Sally Engle Merry, Legal Pluralism, and the Radicalization of Comparative Law

Abstract

At the very beginning of her career, Sally Engle Merry focused on the legal relations of nonlegally trained people—often members of the working class, marginalized or racialized groups. She explored the disjuncture between those people's understandings of disputing and the concepts, language, and procedural distinctions of legal professionals (Merry 1979, 1990, and more). That work brought her into contact with a number of scholars working on what Merry (1988) would call “new legal pluralism”: taking legal pluralism beyond the colonial and postcolonial contexts in which it had predominantly been deployed (“old legal pluralism”) and portraying it as a characteristic of virtually all societies and all law.