Acknowledgements

This is a collective volume in the truest sense of the term. It has benefitted greatly from the input of all those who have been prepared to contribute to it, either by submitting an individual chapter or by serving as discussants or reviewers and who, by posing challenging and insightful questions and comments, indisputably left their mark on this collective endeavour. Without mentioning them by name here, we as editors wish to express our profound gratitude to them.

Special thanks go to Dr Brian Donahoe. We are confident that we speak for everyone involved in the volume when we say that it would have been impossible to carry out this long-term publication project without his continuous and very generous efforts, which included both his organizational and editorial skills and his invaluable intellectual guidance. His stewardship of the volume was an essential task that kept the many interrelated processes moving forward over the years. He was in communication with every single author and painstakingly followed the genesis of each chapter, from the very first version to the final proofs, without ever losing his patience or showing signs of discouragement. For a volume of this size, this is no minor achievement. Trained in legal anthropology himself, he offered input that touched not only on the form but, more importantly, on the content of some decisive arguments. Brian Donahoe’s contribution to this publication is reflected not only in the individual chapters, but throughout the volume itself, which is imbued with his supportive spirit and valuable insights.

Sincere thanks also go to the entire team at Oxford University Press, especially Jamie Berezin, who commissioned the project, and Brianne Bellio, who worked very closely with us as she ushered the project through the various stages of production.

While we were working on this Handbook, we were saddened to learn that Sally Engle Merry (1944–2020) had passed away. Sally played an absolutely central role in different ways in the development of this volume. She lent her support from the outset to the formation of the Law & Anthropology Department, including by serving as a member of its Consultative Committee, where the idea of this Handbook was first discussed in 2014. Her last visit to Germany was in December 2018, when she kicked off the editorial conference for this volume as the first keynote discussant.

Sally was an invaluable and inexhaustible source of inspiration for a great many authors who contributed to this volume. She had a decisive impact on both their thinking and the kind of research they undertook. In her own unprecedented way, she was a very future-oriented thinker and prescient regarding a number of core themes that are addressed in this volume. She herself published pioneering work on many of those themes: legal pluralism, gender, human rights, translation and vernacularization, and law and quantitative indicators, to name but a few. She has left us orphans in many respects, but her legacy is so rich that it will most certainly remain with us for many years to come. This volume can be seen as a tribute to her, along with several others that have already been published in her honour.

All expenses associated with this project, including the conference held in Berlin in December 2018, were borne by the Law & Anthropology Department of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle, Germany.