Sally Engle Merry: Shaping the Anthropology of Law

Abstract

I am grateful to the editors of the Journal of Legal Pluralism for asking me to offer some reflections on the contributions of Sally Engle Merry to the anthropology of law. Rather than a more traditional "in memoriam" or obituary, I thought that I would provide a more substantive discussion of the ways in which Sally’s professional life and research career shaped the field in ways that will be felt for many years to come. These contributions can be divided into three categories: institutional, intellectual, and methodological. In describing the ways in which Sally shaped the development of the anthropology of law through these three categories, I will only highlight the key interventions or concepts that seem to me to best crystallize the scope of Sally’s lasting influence. Institutionally, Sally played a fundamental role in promoting the growth of the anthropology of law both within and beyond the discipline. Her entry to the field in the early to mid-1980s coincided with the rapid expansion of what is called in the United States the law and society movement, which gives some indication of the way in which scholars wanted to do more than simply conduct sociolegal research: they wanted to transform the understanding of law itself by studying it as a consequential social process. Within the law and society movement, Sally became one of the leading voices for anthropology and the ethnographic approach to sociolegal research. Along with a few other anthropologists at the time, Sally worked to ensure that the anthropology of law became well-established among the other, and typically more powerful, disciplines—academic law, political science, sociology—that constituted the core of the law and society project. Her success as an advocate for the anthropology of law within the US Law and Society Association (LSA) was marked by a number of high-level accomplishments: she served as LSA President from 1993-1995; she won the LSA’s book prize in sociolegal history in 2002 (for Colonizing Hawai’i: The Cultural Power of Law, published by Princeton University Press); and, in 2007, was awarded the LSA’s most prestigious award, the Harry J. Kalven Jr. Prize, which is given to scholars who are held in the highest regard by their colleagues (the official description is for "empirical scholarship that has contributed most effectively to the advancement of research in law and society").