Peri J. Bearman (born 1953) is an academic scholar ofIslamic law. She was the associate director of the Islamic Legal Studies Program atHarvard Law School. She is also currently the editor-in-chief and Islam section editor for theJournal of the American Oriental Society (JAOS).

Peri Bearman took degrees inArabic andIslamic studies from theUniversity of Leiden. She was the Islamic Studies acquisitions editor atBrill Publishers from 1990–1997 during which time she founded the journalIslamic Law and Society, the reference worksEncyclopaedia of the Qurʾān andEncyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures, the series Studies in Islamic Law and Society, and numerous other projects that came into being after her departure for Harvard. She was a member of the editorial board of the second edition of theEncyclopaedia of Islam.^[1]

• (ed. with Rudolph Peters and Frank E. Vogel)The Islamic School of Law: Evolution, Devolution, and Progress, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Islamic Legal Studies Program, Harvard Law School : Distributed byHarvard University Press, 2005. Harvard series in Islamic law, 2.
• (ed. withWolfhart Heinrichs andBernard G. Weiss)The Law Applied: Contextualizing the Islamic Shari'a. A Volume in Honor of Frank E. Vogel, London:I.B. Tauris, 2008.
• Peri Bearman, "Islamic Law: In the MENA Region," inOxford Encyclopedia of the Modern World (editor-in-chief:Peter N. Stearns), 4 vols., New York:Oxford University Press, 2008.
• (ed. with Rudolph Peters)The Ashgate Research Companion to Islamic Law, Farnham, Surrey, UK:Ashgate, 2014.
• Peri Bearman,A History of the Encyclopaedia of Islam, Atlanta: Lockwood Press, 2018.
• Peri Bearman,A Guide to a Life of Moral Integrity: An Annotated Translation of Bustān al-ʿārifīn by Abū al-Layth al-Samarqandī, Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2025.

• 1953 births
• Living people
• Leiden University alumni
• Harvard Law School faculty
• Book editors
• American Islamic studies scholars

• Articles with short description
• Short description matches Wikidata