In this lecture - the first Dutch Thomas More Lecture, given in ’s-Hertogenbosch on 30 March 2011 - Ernst Hirsch Ballin (Amsterdam, 1950), former Minister of Justice and Minister of the Interior, now a professor of law at the universities of Tilburg and Amsterdam, finds common ground between Thomas More’s early sixteenth century Christian humanism and present-day issues of law and justice. The beginning of Utopia is set in the Low Countries, and opens with a meeting in Antwerp between Thomas More and the Flemish humanist Peter Giles, after More had visited the Cathedral of our Lady in Antwerp. Giles introduced More to a fictitious traveller who had sailed the Seven Seas. But the meeting between More and Giles in Antwerp was real.