By Peri Bearman
 
Peri Bearman, who retired as associate director of the Islamic Legal Studies Program at Harvard Law School, is widely known as an editor of major works of scholarship on the Islamic Near East. She was senior acquisitions editor for Islamic Studies at Brill Academic Publishers from 1990 to 1997; an editor of the second edition of the Encyclopaedia of Islam from 1999 to its completion in 2006; and is currently associate editor for the Islamic Near East for both the journal (JAOS) and the monograph series of the American Oriental Society. She is co-editor of The Ashgate Research Companion to Islamic Law (Ashgate, 2014), of The Law Applied: Contextualizing the Islamic Shari'a (Tauris, 2008), and of The Islamic School of Law: Evolution, Devolution, and Progress (Harvard Law School, 2005).