This work is the second in a planned tetralogy. Harold Berman believes that revolutions affect not just politics and constitutional law, but whole legal systems. He classes the Investiture Contest, the German Reformation, and the English Civil War and Glorious Revolution (taken together) as three of these. He calls them respectively the papal, Lutheran and Calvinist revolutions, and covers the two latter in the work now under review. Two more volumes, concerned with more secular ‘revolutions’, are planned.

Berman describes the transformation of German law in the sixteenth century and English law in the seventeenth in the light of the religious principles underlying the ‘revolutions’ of those times. In each part, a chronological account is followed by chapters on the resulting shifts in legal philosophy, legal science and the main branches of law. Although he does not consider the Swiss Reformation or its German tentacles in depth, with the result that the Swiss strand of protestantism is represented only by the more radical external Calvinism that called for a sharp distinction between church and civil magistrate, this remains a very solid work. It is based on some very detailed research and gives information not easily accessed elsewhere. There are some insightful general observations as well as the specific, although Berman's account of well-known developments in England may at times appear eccentric to the English reader. Simple errors – ascribing the repeal of the Test Act 1671 to William and Mary, dating the first exclusion of Catholics from the throne to 1701 and not 1688 – appear alongside highly erudite consideration of the legal philosophy of Selden and Hale.

Until the remaining volumes appear it will not be possible to form a final view on Berman's contention that the Western legal tradition is today ‘no longer alive and well’, in part because those who interpret and develop it have lost sight of the way that history, morality and politics hang together in the evolution of the law. But it has already inspired a volume that is a fascinating read for the persevering and a fruitful source of information (with the aid of a comprehensive index). Probably its most useful aspect of all, given how well-read and thorough the author clearly is, lies in the references given to other literature in its extremely full endnotes.