Until recently, studies of Islamic jurisprudence usually began and ended with the texts of medieval Islam. Apart from the Islamic modernists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the reasoning and writings of jurists of the last five hundred years failed to attract interest in their own right. Colin Imber's study of the sixteenth-century Ottoman Sheikh al-Islam, Ebu's-Su‘ud, the preeminent jurisconsult of the Ottoman Empire, is an illuminating and timely addition to a sparse, but growing, literature dedicated to this more proximate inheritance of the contemporary Islamic world.