Dr Melissa Crouch, an associate professor at the Law School, University of New South Wales, has published a groundbreaking edited collection on the Indonesian court system. Featuring 25 different authors, Dr Crouch’s 16-chapter volume aims at documenting and critiquing the reforms to the Indonesian court system that have occurred since the fall of Suharto in 1998, and updating and entrenching the legacy of the late Professor Dan S Lev (1933–2006), the foremost scholar of Indonesian courts and legal culture in his lifetime.Footnote ¹ Full disclosure: I am the author of the chapter in the book on the District Courts (Chapter 3), for which I focused on judicial culture (as a form of “internal legal culture”)Footnote ² in criminal-sentencing decision-making. However, in this review, I wish not to repeat my own findings, but instead share three reasons why I consider the book as a whole to be an important contribution to the burgeoning English-language literature on Asian courtsFootnote ³ and legal culture.Footnote ⁴

First is the relative rarity of scholarship on the divergence of legal culture across courts and over time in the same jurisdiction. Since the 1960s, legal culture has become a widely studied concept, with analysis tending to focus on jurisdictions in a comparative perspective—often the author’s own jurisdiction juxtaposed against somewhere foreign and supposedly exotic. In these studies, culture acts as either the “dependent variable” to be accounted for or else as an “independent variable” explaining cross-national variation in other more easily measurable outcomes.Footnote ⁵ Several examples of the latter are litigation and settlement rates in civil disputes,Footnote ⁶ the severity of punishment in criminal cases,Footnote ⁷ the proportion of dissenting judgments within trials and appeals,Footnote ⁸ the speed of judicial decision-making,Footnote ⁹ and so forth. My assumption is that most of this literature is comparative because a nation-state’s legal culture can be difficult to grasp if it is considered purely in its own context. Legal culture is a “slippery” elementFootnote ¹⁰ —a metaphor coined by Professor Lawrence M. Friedman, often described as the father of cultural studies of law.Footnote ¹¹

What Dr Crouch’s collection manages to achieve is a comparison of how Indonesian legal culture plays out in a horizontal manner, between courts of the same legal jurisdiction, rather than having to look transnationally. It also adds a longitudinal element, because many of the chapters consider whether or how Indonesian legal culture changed with the fall of Suharto in May 1998 and the ensuing Reformasi period (especially Chapters 2, 3, 5, 11, and 15). These two dimensions, horizontal and longitudinal, represent important methodological additions to the traditional transnational comparative study of legal culture.

The reason that Indonesian legal culture works so well for longitudinal study is almost exclusively down to Professor Lev himself. Not many other jurisdictions have such a breadth of existing legal-culture scholarship to draw from, whether from the 1950s and 60s, or later. It is, of course, extremely difficult for a singular scholar to conduct a longitudinal study of legal culture, given the fact that legal culture tends to change only very slowly. Instead, the authors of the various chapters are able to assess whether Lev’s characterizations of Indonesian legal culture and ideology, obtained from his field research in the 1950s and 60s, still apply today, and to ponder what the reasons for any differences might be. As Professor Frank Munger notes in his concluding chapter (Chapter 16), Lev was only a “cautious comparativist,” because he recognized that each nation-state possessed its own unique circumstances.Footnote ¹²

Second, most of the systematic empirical research on Indonesian courts in English has focused on the Constitutional Court and the Supreme Court, such as the work of Stefanus Hendrianto, Simon Butt, and Sebastiaan Pompe.Footnote ¹³ While the book does include chapters on these two courts as those whose decisions have the greatest national impact (Chapters 2 and 11), my own view is that the real strength of the book is its concurrent, and sharper, focus on lesser-known courts and ad-hoc courts, such as the Religious Courts (Chapter 5), Anti-Corruption Courts (Chapter 7), Human Rights Courts (Chapter 13), Fisheries Courts (Chapter 10), Industrial Relations Court (Chapter 14), Juvenile Courts (Chapter 12), and so forth. These are the courts in which the majority of Indonesian cases are heard and so they are better sites through which to observe ingrained practices and beliefs as a representation of legal culture,Footnote ¹⁴ and also through which to observe the public’s relationship with legal institutions.Footnote ¹⁵

The book does not fall into the trap of assuming that the prevailing culture among actors in the Constitutional Court and the Supreme Court is repeated everywhere else, or else assuming that the decision-making process and outputs of Indonesia’s lesser and specialized courts can be explained away using what Daniel Lev called “grand myths.”Footnote ¹⁶ Some typical examples of untested, blanket, assumptions might be: “all Indonesian courts are corrupt” or “the Javanese do things differently from everyone else across the archipelago” or “Indonesians are conflict-averse people who don’t like to use the courts to resolve their disputes” and so forth. Lev disapproved of this kind of essentialism, preferring to document the complexities of the world through his empirical research.Footnote ¹⁷ Many of the authors in this volume have done likewise with their chapters, mostly notably the original empirical work that went into producing Chapters 2 (Supreme Court), 3 (District Courts), 8 (Commercial Courts), 10 (Fisheries Court), and 14 (Industrial Relations Court).

Third and relatedly, Indonesia provides a key case-study of court reform in the context of a transition from authoritarianism to democracy. Numerous jurisdictions both in Asia and farther afield have prioritized judicial reforms upon political transitions,Footnote ¹⁸ but one of the most notable features of Indonesia’s democratization is the mushrooming of specialized courts and dispute-resolution mechanisms after 1998. For example, over the course of the past two decades, Indonesia has added Commercial Courts, a Constitutional Court, a National Ombudsman, Anti-Corruption Courts, Small Claims Courts, and a General Election Supervisory Body, among others.Footnote ¹⁹ As institutions, these are often intended as means of making a clean break from the endemic judicial problems within Indonesia’s authoritarian past,Footnote ²⁰ in preference to reforming the original “generalist” courts such as the Supreme Court or District Courts, alongside working hard to change the beliefs and practices of the individuals operating within the existing judicial system.

The question then arises: Is this an apt model to follow for other developing states emerging from the shadows of authoritarianism? Dr Crouch’s readers can draw their own conclusions but, based on my own reading, the answer the book provides is a qualified “no.” Creating a new, specialized court is an example of what Dan Lev himself called “radical and quick” reform, versus the “relatively slow, gradual change, which is more expensive and requires more sophisticated strategies over the long run.”Footnote ²¹ Dr Crouch’s unique collection of essays on the Indonesian judicial system pinpoints these and other difficulties in the court reforms that have taken place since 1998. The book will prove a timely resource for students, scholars, and campaigners keen to see Indonesia live up to its potential as the ASEAN bloc’s most democratic state.