This landmark publication is the first to assess the foundational contribution of Sally Engle Merry from the human rights law perspective.What impact does over-simplification have on human rights debates? The understandable tendency to regard them as one universal immutable concept ignores their complexity and by extension only serves to weaken them.The 'vernacularization' of rights; ie a language open to translation and interpretation, the ground-breaking approach of legal anthropologist Sally Engle Merry, transformed human rights debates. Here the leading voices in the field assess this approach and show how it is relied on when analysing rights data, under the stewardship of one of the most renowned lawyers of his generation.