In a recent article, I called for the development of a systematic field of study devoted to investigating the causes, conditions, and consequences of immigration detention (Ryo 2019). The two articles in this special issue are cutting-edge studies that answer that call. They leverage multiple methods to overcome enormously difficult data challenges that plague this area of research. As I have argued, “immigration detention … is shrouded in secrecy and bureaucratic barriers that obstruct researchers' access to government data and detention facilities” (Ryo 2019: 98). The studies presented in this special issue illustrate how researchers can rise to this challenge with creativity and persistence to shine a light on largely hidden but critical aspects of immigration detention.

This article introduces the concept of collective liminality, a shared condition of heightened threat and uncertainty experienced by immigrant detainees and their families, as they wait, caught between two possible outcomes: their loved one's (temporary or permanent) release into the US or deportation. Drawing on 2 years of ethnographic data collection between 2015 and 2017 that included accompanying families to visitation at three Southern California detention facilities, and in-depth interviews with former detainees and their relatives, I demonstrate the broader “collateral consequences” that immigration detention inflicts on detainees' loved ones. I find that not only does the detained individual experience liminality, but the detention of a loved one places the family in a state of shared liminality, which is experienced at two levels: material and emotional. These hardships materialize even before the detainees' deportation and can persist even after their release back into the US. This research extends scholarship on the impacts of detention on detainees, and on the consequences of deportation for families. The concept of collective liminality highlights how immigration detention functions as a critical tool of immigrant surveillance, punishment, and exclusion.

This article presents the findings of the first research study of the Institutional Hearing Program (IHP), a prison-based immigration court system run by the U.S. Department of Justice. Although the IHP has existed for four decades, little is publicly known about the program's origin, development, or significance. Based on original analysis of archival records, this study makes three central contributions. First, it traces the origin and growth of the IHP within federal, state, and municipal correctional facilities. Notably, although the IHP began in 1980 as a program to deport Cuban asylum seekers held in civil detention in an Atlanta prison, it now operates to deport noncitizens serving prison sentences in twenty-three federal prisons, nineteen state prison systems, and a few municipal jails. Second, this article uncovers the crucial role that prison-based immigration courts have played in shaping the design of carceral institutions around the priorities of an immigration system that primarily targets Latinos for deportation. Third, this article shows how immigration courts embedded in carceral spaces have served as influential, yet overlooked, incubators of changes to immigration law and practice that today apply to all immigration courts, not just the IHP. These findings have important implications for contemporary understandings of the relationship between immigration detention, racialized control of migration, and penal punishment.

Interdisciplinarity is a delicate achievement. We learned this some years ago when the Program in Law and Society at New York University collapsed. News of the administration's reluctance to continue its support of the Program trickled down to us as graduate students in fall 2009. At the time, the Program's Director (and our advisor) was Sally Merry.

When I started out as a law professor in 1998, I had the extraordinary good fortune to be invited to join a law, culture, and society reading group hosted at Amherst College. This group was fundamental to my development as a scholar in a great many ways, but among the most important was that it brought me into contact with Sally Engle Merry. And Sally, being the incredibly friendly and generous person that she was, extended herself to me from the start, offering her mentorship, providing advice, and generally serving as a bright-spirited and supportive academic comrade. Over the next two decades, we stayed in regular contact. We participated in panels and workshops together. Sally commented on my work, both formally and informally. And nearly every book or article I have published over the past 15 years cites Sally at least once. Finally, I am honored that perhaps Sally's last published work appeared in print shortly after her death in a volume I edited, The Oxford Handbook of Global Legal Pluralism (Berman 2020a). The last email I have from her was typical. She offered enthusiastic congratulations to me on finishing this book, with no reference to her own role as a crucial contributor. Even as her own strength was ebbing, she was a cheerleader for others.

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.

Sally Merry was a brilliant intellectual, a prolific researcher, and a generous, gentle person. Her passing is a great professional and personal loss, and I am deeply saddened.

I knew the outside Sally. We walked together for over 21 years, mostly around Lake Waban at Wellesley College; we could turn a 40-minute walk on the path around the lake into an extended 75-minute excursion by going off the path, then bush whacking our way back. In the winters, we walked on the nearby golf course and into the woods; and when we were pressed for time, we walked in a small neighborhood park near her home in Wellesley. As her breathing became more labored and she was no longer able to walk easily during these past few months, we sat in her backyard in our COVID masks, talking and taking in the sunshine.

Sally Merry was a remarkable scholar and her loss will make a profound impact on the scholarship that shapes the intersection between international human rights law and the local sphere. Hence, the aim of this essay is to make a small tribute to a selected part of her scholarship that connects law and anthropology. Merry shifted the understanding of international law from a global and utopian perspective to something tangible and feasible, which has a direct influence on people's lives and communities.

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.

No doubt, many of these memorial essays for Sally Merry will focus on her scholarly contributions to a field shaped largely by her over the past 40 years or so. As a former student of hers at Wellesley College, my essay falls into a different category of remembrance of Sally. Her influence in my life was so great that I can't tell that story without sharing some of my own.

The work done by Sally Engle Merry around governance indicators provides a clear example of how her scholarship has been original and impactful. She devoted more than a decade to studying the emergence and use of indicators, a widely used strategy for assessing governance mechanisms. Her body of work on indicators includes three books and more than a dozen journal articles and book chapters. These contributions have reshaped the discourse and forced readers to confront the hidden truth about indicators: their imperfect nature as with any other human construct. I, selfishly, have borrowed from her work and used her lenses in contributing to the study and production of human rights indicators. I see my borrowing as a tribute to a must-read scholar whose ideas are worth entertaining and sharing through our work.

The first time I spoke with Sally Merry as an official graduate student in New York University's (NYU) PhD program in sociocultural anthropology, we were meeting in Vanderbilt Hall at the NYU School of Law, an impressive place to me partially because I had worked there for the past 3 years. In that building, I had served assistant and bureaucratic roles, and my engagement with professors extended to their thanks for catering their food and scheduling their conferences. Meeting Sally in Vanderbilt Hall as a PhD student was the first time that I had a meeting with an NYU Law professor as an academic-in-training, as someone who might contribute to scholarship collaboratively and even collegially in the future. Suffice it to say that I was nervous.