In Islamic Legal Thought: A Compendium of Muslim Jurists, twenty-three scholars each contribute a chapter on a distinguished Muslim jurist. The volume is organized chronologically and it includes jurists who represent the formative, classical and modern periods of Islamic legal thought. Each chapter contains both a biography of an individual jurist and a translated sample of his work. The biographies emphasize the scholarly milieu in which the jurist worked—his teachers, colleagues and pupils, as well as the type of juridical thinking for which he is best known. The translated sample highlights the contribution of each jurist to the evolution of both the method and the methodology of Islamic jurisprudence. The introduction by the volume's three editors, Oussama Arabi, David S. Powers and Susan A. Spectorsky, provides a concise overview of the contents.

Contributors include: Oussama Arabi, Murteza Bedir, Jonathan E. Brockopp, Robert Gleave, Camilo Gómez-Rivas, Mahmoud O. Haddad, Peter C. Hennigan, Colin Imber, Samir Kaddouri, Aharon Layish, Joseph E. Lowry, Muhammad Khalid Masud, Ebrahim Moosa, David S. Powers, Yossef Rapoport, Delfina Serrano Ruano, Susan A. Spectorsky, Devin J. Stewart, Osman Tastan, Etty Terem, Nurit Tsafrir, Bernard G. Weiss, Hiroyuki Yanagihashi.