- Berman, Harold Joseph
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▪ 2008American scholarborn Feb. 13, 1918, Hartford, Conn.died Nov. 13, 2007, Brooklyn, N.Y.worked tirelessly to open staid perceptions about Western law to new scrutiny. Berman, who earned a J.D. degree (1947) from Yale University, spent 60 years teaching law, first briefly at Stanford University and then at Harvard University (1948–85 and 1986–89) and for two decades at Emory University in Atlanta. Of Berman's 25 books and more than 400 articles, the most famous was the award-winning Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition (1983), which posited that the modern legal system had its roots not in the 16th century, as was commonly believed, but in the 11th century, beginning with papal canon law. Law and Revolution II: The Impact of the Protestant Reformations on the Western Legal Tradition appeared in 2003. Berman was also a practicing attorney and an expert on Soviet law. One of his most celebrated cases involved a royalties battle in 1958 in Moscow between writer Arthur Conan Doyle's estate and the Soviet Union, with Berman representing Sherlock Holmes's famed creator. Though Berman won the case, the verdict was later struck down on appeal.
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Universalium. 2010.
