Sally Merry's scholarship is wide-ranging and interdisciplinary. Throughout her career she worked in the field of legal anthropology, carrying out research projects in low-income neighborhoods, courthouses, mediation sessions, in Hawaii, and internationally. Sally conducted participant observation, interviews, surveys, used court records, and drew on historical archives. As a graduate student of hers, I have always appreciated the diversity of her knowledge and methods, her creativity in approaching questions about the role of law in society, and her broad interest in how society shaped legal systems. Her long-standing involvement with national and international associations, as well with the American Bar Foundation, meant that she actively participated in the debates surrounding law and society scholarship and was able to communicate the importance of legal anthropology to an interdisciplinary field of sociologists, criminologists, attorneys, political scientists, and historians among many others.

I told her that maybe I shouldn't become an anthropologist; I had just finished law school, just taken the bar exam, and was due to start working at my firm in a few weeks. Sally Merry disagreed.

First an admission. It is a not-so-well-kept secret among many of my friends and colleagues in legal anthropology that Sally Engle Merry and I are related by marriage. She is my wife Lindsey's aunt. I bring this up only because I think it has impacted my effort to write this memorial essay. It has been very hard to write, and in fact, I am only now getting to it on the deadline for its submission, September 25, 2020, just over two weeks since her passing. I think the challenge has to do with whether I should be writing about the obvious impact her tremendous scholarship has had on my own—that is write as a colleague whom she mentored, and who was lucky to call her his friend — or if I should be writing about the indelible experiences I shared with her in various family occasions, including camping trips, weddings, summer vacations, when we also talked at length about our work, the profession, and our thoughts on what anthropology is and where it was heading. Both are appropriate at this time, but of course each comes with a different kind of narrative arc, starting from one place and taking it where it goes.

According to a Chinese aphorism, one purpose of any mourning activity is to stage a show for those who are still alive. I feel sorry if this short essay leaves such an impression. I do not mean to do that. I was not formally a student of Professor Merry, and so I may not be in the best position to document her achievements which include dispute resolution, mediation, legal consciousness, cultural hegemony, human rights, spatial governmentality, and more. But what I wish to say is that, perhaps, no other scholars has been more influential and inspiring to me.

I am teaching Human Rights this fall, and like every time I teach this course, I assign at least one of Sally Merry's articles. The students' response to her work is always gratifying: they are better able to understand difficult concepts, they praise the clarity of her writing, and, by their own admission, they look at human rights from entirely new angles. Merry is not only a giant in human rights scholarship, but she has reshaped many other fields as well—legal pluralism, legal consciousness, indicators, and dispute resolution. Reflections on her life will rightly focus on the impact of her scholarship in law and society, legal anthropology, human rights, and other fields.