This is the first of two brief memoirs of "law and development" projects of the 1960s and '70s1 in which the writer was centrally involved. One of them, the Chile Law Program, had modest ambitions and, until it fell victim to larger political events in Chile, promised to be modestly effective. The other was a quite different project with grander ambitions, called SLADE (for Studies in Law and Development), that has yet to meet the expectations of those who were involved in it. SLADE will be discussed in a subsequent memoir.