Sally Engle Merry, our beloved colleague who passed away in September 2020, was Silver Professor and Professor of Anthropology at New York University. She was also Faculty Co-director of the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at the New York University School of Law. She taught courses on human rights, gender, and legal anthropology, and co-taught the IILJ Colloquium on Infrastructure, Rights and Regulation. She was one of the Principal Investigators in the IILJ project on Indicators, and in the new project on Infrastructure as Regulation.

Her books include The Seductions of Quantification (University of Chicago Press, 2016), The Quiet Power of Indicators (co-edited with Kevin Davis and Benedict Kingsbury, Cambridge, 2015), Governance by Indicators (co-edited with Kevin Davis, Angelina Fisher, and Benedict Kingsbury, Oxford, 2012), Gender Violence: A Cultural Perspective (Blackwells, 2009), The Practice of Human Rights (co-edited with Mark Goodale, Cambridge, 2007), and Colonizing Hawai‘i (Princeton, 2000).

Prof. Merry received the Hurst Prize for Colonizing Hawai‘i in 2002, the Kalven Prize for scholarly contributions to sociolegal scholarship in 2007, and the J.I. Staley Prize for Human Rights and Gender Violence in 2010. In 2013 she received an honorary degree from McGill School of Law and was the focus of an Author Colloquium at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research (ZIF) at the University of Bielefeld, Germany. In 2019, she was awarded the Franz Boas prize, the highest accolade bestowed by the American Anthropological Association.

Prof. Merry was deeply involved in research on human rights, gender violence, colonialism, the hazards of excessive quantification of public policies, and the overlap between anthropology and law. She was a past president of the Law and Society Association, the American Ethnological Society and the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology.