This book provides the first systematic assessment from a human rights law perspective of the landmark contributions of the renowned legal anthropologist, Sally Engle Merry. What impact does over-simplification have on human rights debates? The understandable tendency to present them as a single, universal, and immutable concept ignores their complexity and by extension only serves to weaken them. Merry and her colleagues transformed human rights thinking by highlighting the process of 'vernacularization', which sees rights discourse as being unavoidably dependent upon translation and interpretation. She also warned of the pitfalls of excessive reliance upon statistical and other indicators, through the process of quantification. Here the leading voices in the field assess the significance of these contributions. The covers shows Judith Mason's painting The Man Who Song and the Woman Who Kept Silent (known as 'the Blue Dress'), part of a triptych which hangs in the South African Constitutional Court. The work symbolizes accounts of the killings of two freedom fighters under the apartheid system that emerged in the hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.