Indonesian law and administration as reflected in 150 years of Bijdragen

Abstract

If one had to name the most prominent feature of law and administration in this period it would be growth. Since Independence the numbers associated with law and administration have grown enormously: the number of laws and minor regulations, the number of courts and cases, the number of law faculties, professors, lecturers and sarjana hukum (SH, or graduates). Recent articles are much shorter than in the previous periods, usually running to between 10 and 20 pages. Besides descriptions and analyses of regional adat, we find more general and theoretical reflections on adat law: the early 1950s, for example, saw J. Prins' article on Indonesian politics and adat law (1951, 1340), followed by E.A. Zorab's account of case law of the Adat chamber of the former Batavia High Court from 1930 until 1942 (1954, 1407). [...]we have found a category of miscellaneous aspects of legal and administrative history, such as Jan Bank's comparative study of decolonization policy as it developed in Indonesia and the Netherlands, seen within the context of their respective regions, Southeast Asia and Western Europe (1985, 2207). During the 1950s and early 1960s Dutch law journals were still 750 Jan Michiel Otto, Albert Dekker and Cora de Waaij playing a significant role. Besides the dozens of law articles in Bijdragen, often on legal history and adat law, there was the Mededelingen van het Documentatiebureau voor Overzees Recht of the Leiden law faculty, which published over 220 items between 1951 and 1957 and contained a lot of material on constitutional law and international public law.