Sally Engle Merry, A Tribute

How grateful we are for the life and work of Sally Engle Merry, NYU professor and leading legal anthropologist, who passed away last week at the age of 75.  The tributes and remembrances have been many, notable not just for their praise of Merry’s fierce intellectual leadership and brilliant scholarly contributions but for their descriptions of her generosity, openness, energetic support of junior scholars, and sly wit.  

One of Merry’s core interests was human rights, and with her co-authored work on the effort to enact a local human rights law in New York City, she made a major contribution to the theory and practice of “bringing human rights home” in the U.S.  Published in 2010, the work analyzes the dynamics of a multi-year effort to craft and enact a New York City version of CEDAW and CERD.  Merry and her co-authors conclude that success in moving the human rights needle on the local level “depends on collaboration among social movement leaders, grassroots activists, and legal experts,” noting that such a collaboration “enables relatively powerless actors to mobilize human rights law and discourse from below.”  At the same time, she and her colleagues caution that a focus on “human rights as good governance can derail attention from human rights values.”

With this and other scholarly work on human rights, particularly her work on indicators, Sally Engle Merry made immeasurable contributions to the practice and praxis of human rights at home and abroad.  We will all miss her terribly.