Customary Law and Multiple Legal Systems in Criminal Justice: Indonesia's Penal Reform Experience
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Indonesia's 2023 Penal Code represents a groundbreaking shift from colonial legal monism to constitutional pluralism by recognizing "living law" as a legitimate criminal law source. However, this historic constitutional acknowledgment encounters severe implementation challenges, creating institutional paralysis and intensifying customary law disputes. This qualitative study combines normative legal analysis with comparative case methodology, examining four customary systems: Batak Dalihan Na Tolu, Javanese Rukun, Balinese Desa Adat, and Papua Clan System. The research reveals critical implementation gaps across constitutional, judicial, and community levels, where uniform approaches fail to accommodate Indonesia's 1,300+ diverse customary traditions. Implementation failures manifest through constitutional ambiguity generating legitimacy crises, judicial uncertainty producing inconsistent applications, and community marginalization that transforms dynamic oral traditions into rigid bureaucratic processes. These cascading challenges systematically undermine the constitutional promise of legal pluralism. To address these failures, the study proposes a Managed Legal Pluralism framework structured around four interconnected pillars: Recognition, Regulation, Implementation, and Safeguards. This framework enables differentiated approaches accommodating varying customary compatibility levels while ensuring constitutional compliance. Cross-national analysis with South Africa and Canada validates this integration approach, highlighting risks of excessive formalization while demonstrating pathways for transforming symbolic recognition into effective legal pluralism that balances human rights protection with cultural preservation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".