‘Haj’ Ross was right not to ignore Chomsky's seemingly innocent remark concerning what came to be called the A-over-A condition, which at first looked like just another example of disappearance of an otherwise expected ambiguity following a transformation. Ross's issues with the A-over-A condition changed linguistic theory.

I do not know if Ross realized that the constraint he saw as not “modifiable enough” would turn out to open up so complex an area of research, but the final remarks he wrote in 1967 still apply with equal force to the present work:

As I hope to have shown in the preceding pages, Ross was right about many more things concerning islands, not the least of which was his claim that not all instances of extraction are banned across islands. It has taken syntacticians over forty years to recognize that this, as so many other suggestions he made, was fundamentally on the right track, although many continue to resist this conclusion in the existing literature.

Ross was also aware that once the notion of island got established empirically, why-questions would inevitably arise.