Consensus and Suspicion: Judicial Reasoning and Social Change in an Indonesian Society 1960-1994

Abstract

I draw on the archives from two Indonesian courts to analyze how judges have reached decisions in the face of conflicting legal norms. Judges in the town of Takèngën, in the highlands of Aceh province, hear claims based on Islam and on local social norms (adat). Between 1960 and the mid-1990s, they changed the way they resolved disputes over inheritance cases, from accepting village settlements as valid, to rejecting those settlements as either contrary to Islam or as coercive. I examine the justifications offered in the earlier and the later periods for these decisions. I find that in both periods judges employed creative legal devices to resolve or bridge differences between Islam and adat, and that they consistently referred to broader cultural values of agreement and fairness. I suggest that the change in their decisions was due to the combination of political centralization, increased legitimacy of the Islamic court, and judges' perceptions of a more individualized society.

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