When I contacted Richard Falk six years ago regarding a collection of his writings on the Vietnam War and international law, I did not know that he had a special relationship to Sweden. He had been invited by Peter Wallensteen who – from 1985 to 2012 – was Dag Hammarskjöld Professor of Peace and Conflict Research at Uppsala University to be Visiting Olof Palme Professor for the academic year 1990–91, which, according to Professor Wallensteen, turned out to be a very successful appointment, not least for the doctoral students and the young researchers.

According to Said Mahmoudi, who is now Professor of International Law at Stockholm University, Falk became a good friend and participated in the academic as well as the general cultural and political discussion in Sweden. Professor Mahmoudi responded to an e-mail regarding Falk's status as an international law scholar in Sweden and wrote that Falk

A testimony of the appreciation of Falk's merits is that he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Faculty of Law at Stockholm University in 2006.

However, Falk's contacts with Sweden go further back. Already in 1985 he had been consulted and thanked by Ann-Sofie Nilsson, who spent that year as a Visiting Fellow at the Center of International Studies at Princeton University, for his “valuable suggestions” to her doctoral thesis “Political Uses of International Law” in political science at the University of Lund in 1987.