He married Ruth Harlow of Northampton, Massachusetts on June 10, 1941, and served as a cryptographer in the U.S. Army in the European Theatre of Operations from 1942 to 1945.
While serving in London, Berman became concerned that the Western Allies and the USSR were on a path to continue their pre-war enmity, and that Americans knew very little about the Soviet Union.
In 1958, he represented the estate of Arthur Conan Doyle in Soviet courts, in an unsuccessful attempt to collect copyright royalties from the government of the USSR.
After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989, Berman consulted leading Russian officials on proposed legislation and led seminars for political leaders and academics on the development of legal institutions.
One of the world's most distinguished scholars of Soviet and post-Soviet law, Berman was a Fellow of The Carter Center, with a special focus in U.S.-Russian relations.
[6] In his later years, Berman worked to redress global societal inequalities and to establish systems of trust, peace, and justice in developing countries.
The Institute opened the first Academy of World Law at the Central European University in Budapest in 2000 and a later comparable program in Moscow.
On his death, The New York Times characterized Berman as "a scholar ... whose forceful scholarship altered thinking about Western law's origins."