Professor Sally Engle Merry

September 11, 2020

It’s with tremendous grief that we report that Prof. Sally Engle Merry (NYU Anthropology/Law), a member of the CLD Advisory Board, passed away on September 8, 2020. 

https://as.nyu.edu/anthropology/people/memoriam/n-a.html 

"Although I was never formally a student of Prof. Merry’s, after annual meetings at the AAA conferences and countless emails in which I would seek her advice and thoughts - I began to think of myself as her student. We first met in 2005 at Cornell during a class she guest lectured for Prof. Vilma Santiago-Irizzary. I remember being awe-struck by the breadth of her work, from her pioneering fieldwork with working class laborers in Massachusetts in Getting Justice and Getting Even (1990) to her archival work on law and colonialism in Colonizing Hawai’i (2000) to her newest work, Seductions of Quantification (2016), Prof. Merry set an ambitious and exhilarating agenda for the anthropology of law. From legal pluralism to legal consciousness and from indicators to human rights, Prof. Merry found inventive and indeed ingenious ways to apply the best of anthropology theory and methods to legal questions and problems. What is perhaps more remarkable is that she did so with intense warmth and collegiality. She brought out the best in those around her, a true mentor in every sense of the word. We will miss you, Prof. Merry."

Matthew S. Erie