Measures of Justice: A Symposium in Honor of Sally Engle Merry (1944–2020)
Measures of Justice: A Symposium in Honor of Sally Engle Merry (1944–2020)
law and social inquiry
https://doi.org/10.1017/lsi.2023.33
Pamina Firchow and I edited this symposium in Law & Social Inquiry as a tribute to Sally Engle Merry’s scholarship and as an intervention into contemporary struggles over quantification in global governance. Building on Merry’s account of indicators as a “technology of control,” we argue that the political stakes of measurement lie less in numbers per se than in the institutional choices that determine what is counted, by whom, and to what ends. Merry’s work here was inspiration to us both as scholars and practitioners.
Across eight contributions, the symposium interrogates commensuration as a methodological and legal project that standardizes complex social phenomena like “justice” through comparable metrics and universal categories.
We organize the papers into two threads. First, participants critique the ideological and administrative pressures that push justice measurement toward abstraction, efficiency, and auditability, often at the expense of contextual meaning. Second, our contributors recenter justice as an experiential and relational accomplishment, emphasizing that legitimacy is produced through processes like participation, interaction, recognition, and trust-building.
Collectively, the symposium advances bottom-up and small data approaches, participatory indicator production, and more fine-grained coding strategies, while also extending commensurability critiques to legal disagreement and conceptual heterogeneity in comparative constitutionalism.
Contributors:
“Justice in the Vernacular: An Anthropological Critique of Commensuration” — Mark Goodale. Argues that global justice metrics risk flattening vernacular, context-specific meanings of justice, and calls for more contextualized (“small data”) approaches to commensuration.
“The Paradox of Justice: From Transitional to Everyday Justice” — Peter Dixon, Pamina Firchow, and Fiorella Vera-Adrianzén. Develops an “Everyday Justice” framework through five experiential domains to show how standard consultation and indicator regimes can miss the lived, relational work through which victims experience justice.
“Many Shades of Success: Bottom-up Indicators of Individual Success in Community Courts” — Hadar Dancig-Rosenberg and Tali Gal. Critiques recidivism as the dominant success metric for problem-solving/community courts and proposes multidimensional, bottom-up indicators that capture success as a subjective process (e.g., wellbeing, trust, repaired relationships).
“Reimagining Public Safety: Defining ‘Community’ in Participatory Research” — Naomi Levy, Amy E. Lerman, and Peter Dixon. Uses participatory measurement work on Oakland police reform to show that “community” is multidimensional and contested, and that transparency in defining and selecting community representatives is crucial because it shapes what counts as policy success.
“Reparations, But for What? Presenting a New Approach to Coding Reparations” — Claire Greenstein. Demonstrates that binary measures of whether reparations were “paid” obscure variation in what harms are recognized and compensated, and proposes a finer-grained coding strategy using cross-national data on reparations promises by abuse type and period.
“Measuring Up: A Dialogical Model for Assuring a Reparative Process” — Lisa J. Laplante and Ana María Reyes. Argues that reparations should be evaluated by the inclusiveness and quality of participation throughout design/implementation/evaluation, and offers a reparative protocol (or best-practices minimum) to institutionalize legitimate process.
“Legal Disagreement” — Kevin E. Davis and Alfredo Guerra Guevara. Conceptualizes and measures “legal disagreement” (cross-group differences in expected legal consequences) using World Justice Project survey data across 128 jurisdictions, linking variation to social position and perceived discrimination.
“Constitutionalism with Adjectives: Conceptual Innovation in the Comparative Study of Law” — Diana Kapiszewski, Deborah Groen, and Katja Newman. Builds a large dataset of “adjective-constitutionalism” pairings to show extensive heterogeneity and weak conceptual coordination in how scholars define constitutionalism, including strands that depart from liberal-democratic and equality-centered assumptions.