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.