Origins of the Indonesian Advocacy

Author(s): Daniel S. Lev

Source: Indonesia , Apr., 1976, No. 21 (Apr., 1976), pp. 134-169
Published by: Cornell University Press; Southeast Asia Program Publications at Cornell
University

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 ORIGINS OF THE INDONESIAN ADVOCACY*

Daniel S. Lev

Unlike the European advocacy, the Indonesian advocacy did not

evolve from old beginnings in local history. As in other colonies, it
emerged full grown from the colonial womb, not fully legitimate in the
mother's regard, and with a father from halfway across the world. The
offspring was doomed to be an orphan, but reasonably tough.

The model for the Indonesian advocate was, of course, the Dutch
advocate. For American readers especially, it may be useful briefly
to contrast civil law advocates with American lawyers, for while they
share some functions in many ways they are quite different.1 Unlike
the American lawyer, a generalist who combines adjudicative functions
with documentary responsibilities of all sorts, the civil law advodate,
like the English barrister, is formally concerned almost entirely with
litigation. Generally he or she is not a writer of legal documents.
This function--drafting articles of incorporation, contracts, wills,
and so on--is managed by the notary, who in civil law systems is an
extremely important official very different from the American notary
public. The tacit specialization of trial lawyers and office lawyers
in the modern American legal profession is barely like that of notaries
and advocates. Civil law notaries are at the heart of the formal legal
system, and many transactions are impossible without their services.
The existence of a specialized notariat reduces the need for private
attorneys, not only because advocates may devote themselves purely to
court work, but also because ideally careful documentary preparation
tends to reduce the incidence of litigation. Civil law notaries are
regulated, examined, and licensed by the state, often with greater care
than advocates. While notaries are not so much in the public eye, on
the whole they tend to be a more secure lot than advocates. Their num-
ber is usually limited by the government, and their services are con-
stantly required. The advocacy is much more clearly a private affair,
however, and the number of advocates is not normally determined by the

* This article is a slightly revised chapter from a book I am writing about Indone-
sian advocates. I am deeply grateful to George Kahin and Benedict Anderson for
very helpful criticisms of it. Sumarno P. Wiryanto read an earlier draft of the
manuscript, and I want to thank him for his comments. Throughout the article
there are explanations of matters Indonesian with which most readers of this
journal will be entirely familiar. I am leaving them in, with apologies, to
avoid having to draft many transitional sentences.
1. See generally Rudolph B. Schlesinger, Comparative Law (2nd ed.; Brooklyn: Foun
tion Press, 1959); and Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Lawyers and Their Society: A Com-
arative Study of the Legal Profession in Germany and in the United States
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973).
2. On notaries see Schlesinger, Comparative Law, pp. 11ff.; and Mauro Cappelletti,
John Merryman, and Joseph Perillo, The Italian Legal System (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1967), pp. 100ff.

135

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 I I :::-::i

:I:iii-i-i:%

)i:

The founders of Perhimpunan Indonesia, from left to right, G. Mangunku-

sumo, Mohammad Hatta, Iwa Kusumasumantri, R. Sastromulyono. and R. M.
Sartono (J. Th. Petrus Blumberger, De Nationalistische Beweging in
Nederlandsch-IndiS [Haarlem: Willink & Zoon, 1931], facing p. 186).

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136

state, though local bar organizations may have a say in the matter.
How much work they have depends in part upon how useful and common
litigation is.

In addition, unlike the situation in England and the United States,

in civil law countries private lawyers do not form the core of the le-
gal vocation. The center of gravity of the common law legal profession
is the practicing bar. Legal training is oriented to private legal
practice, not to government service, and the bar associations are con-
trolled by private lawyers. In the civil law tradition, however, pri-
vate lawyers are much less the concern of law faculties and in no way
control or inspire the character of all legal professions. Specialized
career patterns in the judiciary, prosecution, administration, notari-
at, and advocacy, beginning almost from the time of graduation from a
law faculty, tend to fragment the legal professions in civil law coun-
tries.

In the Netherlands Indies, until the mid-1920s, all advocates and

notaries were Dutch. Neither native Indonesians nor ethnic Chinese had
yet joined these professions. The small size and influence of the In-
donesian advocacy just after independence was due at least in part to
its late beginning. This was not true of all colonies. In most English
colonies and the American-controlled Philippines, indigenous lawyers
were numerous.3 It is tempting to attribute the differences simply to
divergent Anglo-American and Continental legal traditions: English and
American colonial officials would see many private lawyers as a basi-
cally good thing, while the French, Dutch, and Belgians would not. In
reality, however, colonial officials nearly everywhere were reluctant
to encourage indigenous private lawyers, and this was equally true on
the colonial right and left. Hard-liners regarded native lawyers as a
likely source of corruption, litigiousness, misuse of the law, and
general trouble-making. Europeans with more sympathy for the socie-
ties they dominated perceived private lawyers as a symptom of the
breakdown of traditional social intimacy in favor of a less kindly im-
personal rule of law, which must spread social and cultural disruption.5

3. While accurate comparative statistics on indigenous advocacies in the colonies

are not now available, and other factors have since influenced the growth of pri-
vate practice in the successor states, one can nevertheless get a glimmer of the
original differences from modern data. Marc Galanter has collected statistics on
"lawyers" (often including government officials as well as private advocates) in
selected states during the late 1950s and early 1960s. At that time India had
75,000 lawyers (189 per million people), Pakistan 15,000 (149 per million), Malay-
sia and Singapore about 270 (35 per million), the Philippines 27,500 (1,018 per
million!) and, by contrast, Indonesia 1,620 (17 per million). Galanter, "Intro-
duction: The Study of the Indian Legal Profession," in III Law and Society Review,
2-3 (November 1968-February 1969), at pp. 204-5. One has to keep in mind, how-
ever, that common law systems generally require more private lawyers than civil
law systems, and other local social and legal institutional factors influence the
size of the bar. Thus in the same years, according to Galanter's data, the
United States had 1,595 lawyers (including those retired, in law schools, in the
government, and so on) per million population, the United Kingdom 507, France
165, Italy 602, and Norway 1,428.
4. See for example J. W. B. Money, Java; or, How to Manage a Colony (2 vols.; London
Hurst and Blackett, 1861), II, pp. 72-73, 85-86. Money, from British India, was
full of admiration for the Dutch in Java and wished English administrators would
take a lesson from them.

5. J. S. Furnivall, Colonial Policy and Practice: A Comparative Study of

Netherlands India (New York: New York University Press, 1948) for a deep

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 137

Each view had its own peculiar validity, though probably for reasons
different from those usually argued. In any event, indigenous private
lawyers did emerge earlier and in greater numbers in some colonies
than in others, depending on a combination of colonial administrative
ideology and economic policy. The English and the Americans tended to
view the rule of law as an essential ingredient of colonial policy and
part of their mission. Encouraging native lawyers therefore had some
logic to it, despite European misgivings. But, at the same time, the
English and the Americans were also more inclined to encourage local
political participation and some entrepreneurial development, from
which local private lawyers would tend to sprout if allowed to do so.
In French and Dutch colonies, however, ideological conceptions of the
imperial mission were quite different, and so were economic policies.
A more pervasive administrative conception of colonial governance em-
phasized the role of European executive will, not law per se. Combined
with a rather exclusive European (and minority middle-man) monopoly
over commerce, this neither encouraged nor left much room for indige-
nous private lawyers.

But things are never all that simple, and the setting in which
Indonesian advocates finally did emerge needs more detailed analysis.
The Netherlands Indies legal order is more helpful than most in trying
to understand this setting, because of the remarkable congruence be-
tween Dutch colonial legal institutions and the social and economic
structure of the colony. What in other colonies was accomplished
through social and political pressure, which legal forms hypocritical-
ly denied, the Dutch often made institutionally explicit.6

cerned and sophisticated argument of this case. There is probably no better or

subtler description than Furnivall's of the differences between English and Dutch
colonial styles and their consequences. In a speech he delivered to a Dutch
audience during the 1930s, and which he excerpted in his book, Furnivall con-
trasted British administration in Burma with that of the Dutch in Indonesia thus:
". .. Our officers are magistrates; yours are policemen and welfare officers.
Our methods are repressive, yours are preventive. Our procedure is formal and
legal; yours, informal and personal. Our civil service is an administrative
machine; yours is an instrument of Government. Our aim is negative--to suppress
disorder; yours is positive--to maintain order. Order--it is a word we both use
frequently, but with a significant difference of context. We talk of 'law and
order' and you of 'rust en orde'; but in the absence of a social conscience it
is difficult to distinguish between law and the letter of the law, and between
rust [rest, tranquillity] and the placidity of a good baby in its perambulator.
The caricature which depicts your system as a baboe, a nursemaid, and ours as a
babu, a clerk, does emphasize a difference in vital principle. You try to keep
a man from going wrong; we make it unpleasant for him if he does go wrong. You
believe in protection and welfare; we believe in law--and liberty" (pp. 272-73).
But the irony of the colonial condition, as Furnivall probably understood, was
that neither welfare nor liberty was achieved in any real sense for Indonesians
or Burmans.

6. On the formal legal system of the colony see J. H. Carpentier Alting, Gron
der Rechtsbedeeling in Nederlandsch-Indii (2nd ed. rev.; The Hague: Nijhof
1926), and A. D. A. de Kat Angelino, Staatkundig Beleid en Bestuurszorg in
landsch-Indi8 (2 vols.; The Hague: Nijhoff, 1930), II; in Indonesian, see R.
Supomo, Sistim Hukum di Indonesia sebelum Perang Dunia II (3rd ed.; Jakarta:
Noordhoff-Kolff, 1957), and E. Utrecht, Pengantar dalam Hukum Indonesia (7th ed
rev.; Jakarta: Ichtiar, 1962), pp. 270ff.; and, in English, see B. ter Haar, Adat
Law in Indonesia (New York: Institute of Pacific Relations, 1948), especially the
introduction by Hoebel and Schiller, pp. 1-43, and Amry Vandenbosch, The Dutch

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138

There is no room here for a full description of the colonial

social-legal order, but a brief one is worth trying. To begin with,
when the Dutch government took over the Indonesian heartland of Java
as a colony following the Napoleonic wars, the administration they
established was one of indirect rule, built on a political alliance
between the Dutch and the Javanese priyayi elite. The alliance was
mutually advantageous in that the Javanese elite retained a semblance
of authority, the Dutch were enabled to exploit the island under condi-
tions of relative stability, and both were able to avoid any growth of
Islamic power. Java was governed like a huge plantation by the colo-
nial administration itself until the last quarter of the nineteenth
century, when under the "liberal" system Dutch private companies were
allowed to buy up much of the productive capacity of the island.7 Lib-
eral ideology had begun to make itself felt earlier, however, in chang-
ing concepts of colonial administration. As Furnivall once described
it, Dutch administration in Java was originally predicated on a highly
authoritarian assumption of executive prerogative." No doubt this
suited the Dutch concern for efficient exploitation of Java's agricul-
tural wealth, and at the same time fitted well with the patrimonial
traditions of Javanese social and political organization. But by the
middle of the nineteenth century colonial policy began to shift in
favor of principles of legality.9 From the late 1840s on, new codes
were promulgated, judicial organization and policy were developed and
refined, and general administration was rationalized by appropriate
rules and regulations.l) These reorganizations significantly prepared
the way for the period of private capital development that began in
the 1870s.

The reohtsstaat was thus introduced to the colony at this time.

What is usually missed in this history, however, is that the colonial
rechtsstaat essentially governed the affairs of the Dutch community
and those related closely to it. Between the Dutch, on the one hand,
and Indonesians, on the other, relationships were based not on commonly
accepted legal norms in a consensual structure of authority, but on commonly
understood realities of power. In the administration of the Indonesian
population, older patrimonial traditions never disappeared, neither
among Dutch nor Indonesian bureaucrats. Early in the twentieth century
the colonial administration adopted the "Ethical" policy, aimed at in-
digenous welfare and social development. It was the fundamental failure

East Indies: Its Government, Problems, and Politics (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1944), chapters 11 and 12. The most important
codes and statutes that will be mentioned in the text can be found in various
editions of E. M. L. Engelbrecht's De Wetboeken, Wetten en Verordeningen Bene
de Voorlopige Grondwet van de Republiek Indonesia, among others the 1954 edi
tion, published in Leiden by A. W. Sijthoff.
7. On the effects of Dutch agricultural policies in the nineteenth century, see C.
Geertz, Agricultural Involution (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of Cali-
fornia Press, 1963).

8. J. S. Furnivall, Netherlands India: A Study of Plural Economy (Cambridge: Ca

bridge University Press, 1944), pp. 187ff. and 257ff.
9. By "legality" I mean the rule-oriented concepts of bureaucratic administration
and political organization that Weber analyzed in his discussion of rational-
legal authority. See Max Rheinstein, trans., ed., and annotator, Max Weber on
Law in Economy and Society (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1954). The
legal system that evolved in Indonesia under Dutch direction was naturally in-
formed by Continental rechtsstaat principles, which have a strong administra-
tive bias.

10. Ibid., and Carpentier Alting, Grondslagen.

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 139

of this policy, as Furnivall argued, that the "protective" colonial

administration encouraged placidity rather than self-reliance. Nor
did it produce much welfare.11
Dutch power did not expand fully to the rest of the Indonesian
archipelago until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
On Sumatra, Sulawesi, Kalimantan, and the many smaller islands there
were numerous distinct ethnic groups, each with its own culture, polit-
ical system, social organization, and history. Some the Dutch con-
quered; with others they negotiated agreements. In developing the
administration of these areas the Javanese experience was not always
relevant or useful. In some places local authority and traditional
institutions were left much as they were, though Dutch administrative
officials assumed influence over them. In other places new colonial
institutions were imposed upon local populations, often on the Javanese
pattern but regulated by different codes. The distinction generally
made was between directly governed territories and self-governing
lands, but for our discussion it is not important.12
Several basic principles evolved in the management of this social,
political, and cultural m61ange. First, the population of the colony
was classified according to a racial criterion, which had obvious but
unstated economic significance. Population groups included the Dutch,
Indonesians, Chinese, and other foreign orientals--for example, Arabs
and Indians. Apart from cultural differences, which alone might jus-
tify different legal treatment, the reality of the matter was that the
Dutch exercised political and economic control over the colony, Indone-
sians were primary producers, and Chinese, Arabs, and Indians were
economic middlemen. Legal rules and patterns of institutional traffic
reflected not only the cultural characteristics and needs of the dis-
tinct population groups, but also their different economic roles.13
A second related principle concerned the complicated problem of
changes in cultural identity, which also had social and political sig-
nificance. As in other colonies, being European meant having a lion's
share of social and economic advantages. Consequently the colonial
administration had to determine by what means and in what measure
people could assimilate legally to European status. Indo-Europeans,
for example, were normally accorded European status, assuming that the
father was Dutch and, in case of illegitimacy, that the child had been
formally recognized by the father. Converts to Christianity were for
certain purposes assumed to be assimilated to European status, though
a good deal of doubt and change in policy clouded this issue between

11. See J. H. Boeke, The Structure of the Netherlands Indian Economy (New York:
Institute of Pacific Relations, 1942).

12. Carpentier Alting, Grondslagen, pp. 72ff., 211ff., 305ff.

13. To manage relationships between the various racial and ethnic groups, a body
conflicts rules evolved that were refined and given theoretical order by a num-
ber of Dutch and, later, Indonesian scholars. The outstanding seminal work was
done by R. D. Kollewijn, collected in his Intergentiel Recht (The Hague and Ban-
dung: van Hoeve, 1955). See also Gouw Giok Siong, Hukum Antargolongan (2nd ed.
rev.; Jakarta: Ichtiar, 1960) and his Segi-Segi Hukum Peraturan Perkawinan Tjam-
puran (Jakarta: Djambatan, 1958). It is a mark of the colonial condition that
while Kollewijn and other conflicts scholars argued sincerely for as assumption
of legal equality between all groups in the colony--that adat law, for example,
was no lower than European law--nothing could have been further from social
realities.

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140

the middle of the nineteenth century and the first two decades of the
twentieth. Moreover, a law of 1917 made it possible for individuals
to assimilate voluntarily, in part or in whole, to European legal
status. But few people chose to become legally "European."'~4
A third principle governed the administration of the highly di-
verse Indonesian population itself. From the beginning of colonial
history the Dutch took the view that Indonesians should normally live
by their own customary rules--adat law--except where these violated
"general principles of justice and morality." There is no simple way
to deal with all the significant nuances of colonial adat law policy,
which Dutch and Indonesian scholars argued about for decades.s15 In
part it was a policy of convenience and even fairness to allow people
to live by local adat. Yet Dutch support of adat was also a means of
reinforcing traditional local authority against the rise of Islamic
power, which for centuries had challenged the legitimacy of customary
elites rooted in adat symbols.16 Moreover, it was a matter of fierce
debate whether colonial adat law policy, as it evolved from the 1910s
under the influence of Dutch adat law scholars and their Indonesian
students, was a help or hindrance to the "development" or "moderniza-
tion" of Indonesian society. C. van Vollenhoven in Leiden and B. ter
Haar in the colony, both enormously respected by their Indonesian stu-
dents, successfully opposed legal unification in the Netherlands
Indies. With support from Indonesian legal scholars, such as the late
Professor R. Supomo, they went on to encourage adat research, new judi-
cial policy with respect to local adat, and even restoration of old
customary judicial institutions that had decayed.17 While many Indone-
sian leaders favored colonial adat law policy because of its anti-
Islamic bias or because it did, after all, maintain something that
belonged unequivocally to Indonesian cultures, others perceived it
mainly as colonial divide and rule strategy.

These brief comments are inadequate to the subject of Netherlands

Indies social-legal policy, but they provide at least a superficial
backdrop for describing the institutional structure in which Indonesian
advocates eventually emerged.

Because advocates are oriented primarily to courts, we will focus

on this part of the legal system. It was the judiciary that most accu-
rately manifested the meanings of colonial pluralism. Plural judicial
systems were not unusual in the colonies, where European courts often
existed alongside religious and customary courts. In the Netherlands
Indies, however, there were no fewer than four distinct kinds of
courts: government courts of Europeans, government courts for non-

14. A. C. Tobi, De Vrijwillige Onderwerping aan het Europeesch Privaatrecht (Lei

van Doesburgh, 1927).
15. See C. van Vollenhoven, De Ontdekking van het Adatrecht (Leiden: Brill, 1928),
and R. Supomo and R. Djokosutono, Sedjarah Politik Hukum Adat (2 vols.; Jakarta:
Djambatan, 1950-54).
16. See J. Prins, Adat en Islamietische Plichtenleer in Indonesie (The Hague and
Bandung: van Hoeve, 1954); Harry J. Benda, The Crescent and the Rising Sun (The
Hague and Bandung: van Hoeve, 1958); and Daniel S. Lev, Islamic Courts in Indo-
nesia (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1962).
17. See, inter alia, B. ter Haar, Verzameldde Geschriften and Naschriften (Jakarta:
Noordhoff-Kolff, 1950), in three volumes, compiled by R. Supomo.

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 141

Europeans, Islamic courts, and adat courts.18 The traffic between and
among them reflected and subtly symbolized distinctions of function,
power, prestige, and status of population groups in the colony.

The foremost system of courts, standing above and dominating all

others, was the one for Europeans. It included a first instance resi-
dentiegerecht, in the jurisdiction of the Dutch resident; an appellate
raad van justitie in the colonial capital of Batavia, Semarang, Sura-
baya, Padang, Medan, and Makasar; and the highest court of the Nether-
lands Indies, the Hooggerechtshof. Judges of the raden van justitie
and the "Hof," as lawyers familiarly called it, were trained jurists,
the law elite of the colony, who were accorded great prestige and
honor. Prosecution before these courts was managed by fully trained
officieren van justitie, the staff of a Continental-style parquet. The
codes applied followed closely the codes used at home in the Nether-
lands: the civil code (burgerlijk wetboek), the commercial code (wet-
boek van koophandetl), the code of civil procedure (reglement op de
rechtsvordering), and the code of criminal procedure (reglement op de
strafvordering). In 1915, the criminal code (wetboek van strafrecht
voor Indonesia) was unified for all population groups, but not criminal
procedure.

The primary community served by these institutions and codes was

Dutch, and all judges and prosecutors (with one or two exceptions among
the latter in the 1930s) were Dutch government lawyers trained in Dutch
law faculties. By the nature of colonial pluralism, however, certain
non-Dutch groups were also accorded the special consideration of Dutch
law and judicial institutions. In part the criteria were racial: all
Europeans automatically came under the jurisdiction of Dutch civil,
commercial, family, and criminal law and merited the rigor and safe-
guards of the European procedural codes. But in 1899, after consider-
able diplomatic pressure and a new treaty of commerce and navigation
(1896), the Japanese also were accorded a status equivalent to the
Europeans'; international economic and political power overrode the
contradiction.

In part, too, the criteria were functional. All commercial trans-

actions that made use of instruments (for example, contracts) common
to European practice were subject to the commercial code and to the
jurisdiction of European courts. Any use of such commercial instru-
ments automatically implied submission to the European commercial code
for the purpose of the given transaction, whether or not those involved
were aware of it. Here racial distinctions did not matter.

It has already been mentioned that non-European individuals could

voluntarily submit in whole or in part to European law. An Indonesian,
for example, could explicitly accept an obligation according to European

18. Actually the categories of judicial institutions were further refined in the
colony. Formally, there were government courts in directly governed and self-
governing territories, native courts in directly governed territories, native
courts in self-governing lands, Islamic courts, and village courts, by which was
usually meant informal village conciliation proceedings. Native courts in di-
rectly governed territories existed entirely outside of Java and Madura: in the
Sumatran areas of Aceh, Tapanuli, West Sumatra, Jambi, Palembang, Bengkulu and
Riau, and in Kalimantan, Sulawesi, the Maluku islands, and the island of Lombok,
east of Bali. In addition, there was another court for all population groups,
the landgerecht, which will be mentioned again shortly. On judicial structure
in the colony, see Supomo,Sistim Hukum, Carpentier Alting, Grondslagen, and R.
Tresna, Peradilan di Indonesia dari Abad ke Abad (Jakarta and Amsterdam:
Versluys, 1957).

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142

law, or he might avoid this in favor of adat rules; or, by engaging in

certain transactions, he might automatically fall under given rules of
the European code. With respect to one non-European group, however,
there was no question of permitting a choice in the matter. Overseas
Chinese in Indonesia were the most important middle-level commercial
class in the colony. Until the twentieth century, when overseas Chi-
nese nationalism began to produce organizations and demands, the social
condition of Indonesian Chinese was not especially pleasant. Distrusted
by both indigenous Indonesians and the Dutch, much of the Chinese popu-
lation was confined to ghettos, encumbered with travel restrictions,
and paid little attention by administrators in charge of welfare and
education.19 The Constitutional Regulation of 1854 had given Chinese
the same legal status as Indonesians. But in 1855 the colonial admin-
istration, having authority to make exceptions to the legal classifi-
cation of population groups, made Chinese and other "foreign orientals"
subject to the commercial code, thus providing Europeans with protec-
tion and ultimate economic control. Yet, for the rest, Chinese remained
assimilated to the legal status of "natives." Chinese family affairs,
for example, were governed by Chinese custom. In criminal litigation
Chinese were under the jurisdiction of the law and courts for Indone-
sians. Apart from other palpable disadvantages--for example, criminal
sentences were sometimes harsher in courts for Indonesians than in
those for Europeans--socially and politically conscious Chinese re-
sented their classification as "natives," for whom they had little more
regard than had the Dutch. After the turn of the century, particularly
once the Japanese had won a change in their legal status, overseas Chi-
nese organizations pressed for similar changes. In the 1920s, when
Kuomintang China had adopted legal reforms on the European model, the
Indonesian Chinese civil law status was altered and, except for family
law rules of adoption, they were brought under the European civil code
and removed almost completely from the civil jurisdiction of the courts
for Indonesians. But the Chinese were never fully assimilated to Euro-
pean status and remained under the criminal jurisdiction of courts for
Indonesians.20

Finally, the criteria that determined European court jurisdiction

were partly political. For Indonesians of royal title, bupati and
other politically significant local administrators, judges and clerks
in Indonesian courts, military officers, and certain high Indonesian
officials in the central administration of the colony, a "privileged
forum" was reserved in the raden van justitie. The privileged forum
was a symbol of the special relationship that existed between colonial
administration and Indonesian elite, and at the same time emphasized
the gulf between the latter and the majority of Indonesians.

19. Lea E. Williams, Overseas Chinese Nationalism: The Genesis of the Pan-Chinese
Movement in Indonesia, 1900-1916 (Glencoe: Free Press, 1960). Also Furnivall,
Netherlands-India, on the Indonesian Chinese.
20. During the twentieth century a growing number of Chinese students went to Dutch
schools, the Chinese elite became culturally "Westernized," and Chinese commerce
became increasingly corporate. On the issue of the "native" criminal law status
of overseas Chinese, not all Chinese leaders agreed that a change would be ad-
vantageous. In the late 1920s and 1930s a few ethnic Chinese lawyers argued
within the Chinese community that while it might be socially gratifying to be
assimilated to European status, the H.I.R. made it easier sometimes to win ac-
quittals, and moreover (this only half facetiously) that prison rules for Indo-
nesians were in some ways easier to live with than rules for Europeans.

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 143

Government courts for Indonesians were a different matter. There

were also three instances: districtsgerecht, regentschapsgerecht, and
landraad. The landraad was the ancestor of the modern Indonesian
pengadilan negeri, the first-instance court of the independent state.
In the Netherlands Indies a landraad sat in each of the eighty kabu-
paten of the islands of Java and Madura, and in several cities outside
Java. Most landraad judges were Dutch, though by the 1920s and 1930s
several trained Indonesian lawyers were appointed to the bench. These
Indonesian courts had jurisdiction over Indonesians and those assimi-
lated to the status of Indonesians, including Chinese in criminal
prosecutions. Much of their civil work was governed by local adat law
--for example, inheritance, land transactions, disputes over pawning,
sale, and purchase of village produce, and so on. Significant commer-
cial disputes did not come before landraden unless a question arose as
to whether adat law or the commercial code applied and the defendant
was an Indonesian. Family disputes of Indonesian Christians also came
before Indonesian courts; after wavering a bit the colonial administra-
tion concluded that indigenous Christians remained "natives."

In criminal jurisdiction, courts for Indonesians applied the uni-

fied criminal code, but procedure was governed by a special code, the
Inlandse Reglement (Native Regulation) later revised as the Herziene
Inlandse (Indonesisch) Reglement (Revised Native--Indonesian--Regula-
tion). (Outside Java a different regulation, the Rechtsreglement
Buitengewesten, was in force, though much of it was similar to the
H.I.R.) The H.I.R. remains the basic procedural code of independent
Indonesia. Compared with the European strafvordering (code of criminal
procedure) the H.I.R. was (is) a simpler code, less demanding of judges
and prosecutors, and also less rigorous in protecting accused persons.
The prosecutor in the landraad, the jaksa, was a very lowly official
compared with the European officier van justitie. He had little legal
training, and was not deemed to need much. In session he sat behind
the bench alongside the judge. The landraad chairman himself was re-
sponsible for drafting proper and correct indictments. While advocates
might appear in landraden trials, this was not encouraged. The H.I.R.
permitted litigants to represent themselves in court, obtaining what-
ever help they needed from judges or court clerks. If someone chose
to hire counsel, it did not have to be anyone with legal training.
Indonesian litigants often engaged a pokrol bambu, a kind of bush-
lawyer, to represent them in court.

Decisions of landraden in Java and Madura could be appealed to

raden van justitie. In 1938, a third chamber was created in the raad
van justitie of Batavia to hear appeals from all landraden in Java and
Madura, in order to ensure jurisprudential unity among Indonesian
courts. The same was done in the raad van justitie of Padang, with
jurisdiction over West Sumatra, Bengkulu, and Tapanuli, but too late
to go into effect before the Japanese occupation.

The last two court systems require less attention, not because
they were insignificant or uninteresting, but because they were less
relevant to private lawyers. One was the Islamic judiciary, which
existed throughout Java and Madura, and here and there in Sumatra,
Kalimantan, Sulawesi and other islands. Although Islamic courts were
treated with contempt by both Dutch and Indonesian elites, they were
influential enough as a political-religious symbol to assure their sur-
vival. Their limits were evident, however, in a complete dependence
on local landraden for executory authority.21

21. Lev, Islamic Courts in Indonesia.

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144

The other courts, hardly a system, were local adat institutions.

In Java they existed only in the royal houses of Surakarta and Yogya-
karta. Outside of Java they were much more common. Presided over by
local authorities, these courts of "native justice" (inheemse recht-
spraak) theoretically represented the autonomy of local adat communi-
ties. In fact, however, local colonial administrators observed, took
part in, and influenced their proceedings.22 As the new adatrechtpoli-
tiek developed in the 1920s and 1930s, adat courts were reorganized in
several areas of the colony. In some cases where traditional courts
had already disappeared, or begun to, they were created anew. Far from
being slavishly traditionalist, however, the administration also estab-
lished new adat appellate instances, for example in Tapanuli, West
Sumatra, and South Sumatra. Government judges usually chaired these
adat appeals courts. Actually, then, the autonomy of adat courts was
limited, in the same way that the political autonomy of provincial
societies was limited, by the colonial administration. In civil cases,
by European definition, the substantive rules applied by adat courts
came from local adat law. In criminal affairs adat rules also applied,
but with less leeway; the colonial criminal code was obligatory with
respect to some issues, and in others its rules and concepts were in-
fluential in adat court proceedings as a result of pressure from local
administrative officials.

There were still other courts, most of which need not concern us
here. The only court for all population groups was the landgerecht,
created in Java and Madura in 1914 and in several cities in Sumatra,
Sulawesi, and New Guinea in 1919. The landgerecht handled only rela-
tively minor criminal matters. It represented the only successful
attempt to overcome legal pluralism in the colony, but it was a shal-
low success. Although the landgerecht could try persons from all popu-
lation groups, the investigation of Europeans followed the stringent
rules of the strafvordering while that of Indonesians (and others with
equivalent legal status) followed the simpler H.I.R.

If we drew a map of the distribution of judicial authority and

litigational traffic in the Netherlands Indies, and superimposed it
upon an analogous map of political power, economic interests, and
social-political alliances, the fit would be extraordinarily close.
The most impressive lines of authority, social and political status,
and, above all, commercial traffic would lead directly to the European
courts. Traveling these heavy lines as on modern freeways were Dutch
advocates and notaries.

The colonial administration never encouraged Indonesians to take

up private legal practice. Fundamental assumptions of colonial plural-
ism in the Netherlands Indies excluded such a notion from the imagina-
tion. The highest levels of commerce were in European hands, and
businessmen would naturally rely upon Dutch advocates and notaries.
Nor would Chinese entrepreneurs choose an Indonesian over a Dutch law-
yer. Social status considerations alone would have made this unlikely,
and besides, as the legal system was dominated by Dutch officials, it
obviously made sense to use Dutch counsel. (There were no ethnic Chi-
nese private lawyers either until after Indonesians had begun practice
in the mid-1920s.) Moreover, the common myths of colonial paternalism

22. See the superb study of Toba Batak adat law and institutions by J. C. Vergouwen
first published in 1933 as Het Rechtsleven der Toba-Bataks, translated as The
Social Organisation and Customary Law of the Toba-Batak of Northern Sumatra
(The Hague: Nijhoff, 1964).

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 145

no doubt made the idea of Indonesian advocates, if anyone thought of

it, seem outlandish. European administrators usually assumed that the
colonial bureaucracy was sufficient for the "simple" legal problems of
village life. This same view that native legal problems were uncom-
plicated, along with other considerations, undoubtedly helped to in-
spire the simpler procedural requirements of the H.I.R., by which it
was assumed that Indonesian litigants did not require assistance by
counsel. I do not mean to argue that the simpler procedures were
without virtue, but that the policy grew out of a colonial world-view
that had other institutional consequences. One of them was that Indo-
nesian advocates seemed out of the question.

Indonesian society was not much more receptive than the Dutch to
the possibility of Indonesian advocates. Or at least Javanese society
was not, and at first it was only Javanese who took up legal studies.
When legal training was finally made available to Indonesians, it was
confined to Javanese priyayi. Since legal training was seen as prepar-
atory to government service, only the sons of high priyayi--often from
bupati families--were encouraged to study law; the traditional elite
was to be modernized, not expanded. Once the opportunity for legal
education became available, however, some lower priyayi families also
took advantage of it. But among both higher and lower strata of this
Javanese elite, social status was attached to bureaucratic position.
Private occupations of nearly any kind, and certainly occupations re-
lated to commerce, were regarded unfavorably as low status and un-
worthy. Few sons of the priyayi were likely, therefore, to receive
much family encouragement to become private lawyers.

Consequently, two kinds of change had to take place in the colony

in order for Indonesian private lawyers to appear. One was institu-
tional and obvious: legal education had to be made available to Indo-
nesians. The other was cultural and attitudinal: a few Indonesians
with legal training had to become comfortable with the possibility of
private practice.

Legal education, like other kinds of education, developed late in

the Netherlands Indies.23 During the second half of the nineteenth
century, provision was made for training administrators, teachers, and
medical assistants, but there were no universities. Dutch students
returned to Holland for higher education; by the turn of the century
a few Indonesians of high birth followed. During the Ethical period,
education for Indonesians received much more attention. This was due
partly to the views of sympathetic and liberal Dutch officials who
sought to give Indonesians, particularly Javanese at first, the tech-
nical wherewithal to be self-reliant. It was also due to a growing
need for trained personnel to fill the expanded services of colonial
administration in Java and those other parts of the archipelago re-
cently brought under colonial control. In the first decade of this
century advanced schools were established to train agricultural tech-
nicians, veterinarians, and teachers.

When the government in Batavia announced that it would create a

law school for Indonesians, Dutch lawyers opposed the idea on grounds
that "natives" were not up to the rigorous demands of legal training

23. On educational policy development in the colony, see the compilation of mate-
rials by S. L. van der Wal, Het Onderwijsbeleid in Nederlands-Indi~ 1900-194
(Groningen: Wolters, 1963), and I. J. Brugmans, Geschiedenis van het onderwi
in Nederlandsch-Indih (Groningen: Wolters, 1938).

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146

and work.24 Many of them may have feared that the prestige of the law
would be contaminated by a "native" presence, but it also seems likely
that they realized, or at least sensed, that the availability of Indo-
nesian lawyers might well reduce the demand for Dutch lawyers in the
colony. The government disregarded the protest and in 1909 opened the
Rechtsschool in Batavia.

It was actually a secondary law school, which students entered in

their mid-teens for six years of study. Instruction was in Dutch,
which meant that only the sons of elite families were admitted--after
graduating from Dutch-language primary and middle schools and, fre-
quently, being boarded with a Dutch family to improve their command of
the language. The Rechtsschool offered a truncated program emphasizing
criminal law and procedure. Training was rigorous; only about a third
of those who matriculated passed the final examinations to become
rechtskundigen, as Rechtsschool graduates were called. The Rechts-
school was open only to Indonesian students until 1922, when other
groups were allowed to apply (no more than three or four Europeans and
Chinese were accepted). It lasted until 1928, when the first meester
in de rechten degree was conferred by a fully accredited law faculty
in Batavia. Between 1915, when its first class finished, and 1928 the
Rechtsschool graduated approximately 150 rechtskundigen.25 In later
years rechtskundigen who had not taken advanced degrees in Holland or
Batavia were looked down upon by non-rechtsschool graduates who had.
After independence two law associations were formed, one of which
(PAHI) accepted rechtskundigen as members while the other (ISHI) re-
stricted membership to those holding full law degrees. It was gener-
ally agreed nevertheless that rechtskundigen were well trained in law.
Several became judges, and the first chief public prosecutor of the
independent state, the highly respected Suprapto, was a graduate only
of the Rechtsschool.

But the sole purpose of the Rechtsschool was to furnish Indonesian

clerks, jaksa, and eventually judges for landraden and landgerechten.
Its graduates could not have become notaries or advocates, for they had
little training in civil law and procedure. Yet it did provide the
original educational base from which Indonesian law students could be
introduced to the possibility of private practice.

In the late 1910s rechtskundigen were given an opportunity to

study for meester in de rechten degrees in Holland. Several left for
Leiden as soon as they could, to be followed by other rechtskundigen
and, later, by those who went directly to Leiden without attending the
Rechtsschool first. The government sponsored many students at Leiden,

24. Furnivall, Netherlands-India, pp. 246-47. Furnivall wrote that a Dutch news-
paper at the time argued that natives lacked the quality of independent judgment
and opinions, which its editors presumably supposed that lawyers need. Similar-
ly, in reaction against a new medical school in 1913 the Medical Association of
the colony said that ". .. the moral virtues of a doctor were, by nature, for-
eign to the East, and that men trained in the new school would make a pastime
of seduction and a living from abortion" (p. 247). With respect to Dutch law-
yers, many of whom opposed the new law school, it is also true that several
leading lights of the Ethical movement were successful advocates: for example,
van Dedem, Fock, and van Deventer, who in 1899 wrote the article, "A Debt of
Honor" (Een Eereschuld),that crystallized the ideas of the Ethical policy.
25. This figure was calculated from the annual colonial statistical abstracts,
Indisch Verslag, 1922-27.

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 147

but some went on their own with support from family or friends. Those
paid for by the government were obliged to return to civil service
positions. By 1928 forty-five Indonesians had law degrees from Leiden.
In the meantime, in 1924 a new law faculty was established in Batavia:
the Rechtshogeschool. By 1927, there were 131 law students in Batavia,
of whom 36 were Dutch, 25 Chinese, and 70 ethnic Indonesian.26 Begin-
ning in 1928 the Rechtshogeschool graduated a small but steady stream
of Indonesian lawyers, yet those who could afford to still went to
Holland. Leiden had incomparably greater prestige, and the experience
of having been to Holland, of having studied with van Vollenhoven and
other well-known professors, and of having traveled in Europe, gave
those who had Leiden degrees an edge of status in the professional law
community. During the first few years of independence, the highest
positions in the national judiciary and Ministry of Justice consistent-
ly fell to those with degrees from Leiden, though they were a minority
of graduated lawyers.

By 1940 there were nearly three hundred ethnic Indonesian lawyers,

not including rechtskundigen, and a growing number of ethnic Chinese
counterparts. During the Japanese occupation a list of ethnic Indone-
sian lawyers was compiled for the military administration. While the
list may lack a few names and provides no information on ethnic Chi-
nese, it does offer a limited profile of the developing class of Indo-
nesian lawyers.27" Through 1939, according to this list, 274 ethnic
Indonesians had taken law degrees. Of these no less than 108 studied
in Leiden, 9 in Utrecht,28 and at least 146 of the remainder at the
Rechtshogeschool in Batavia. Judging from ethnic names (which ensures
some margin of error), 175 of the 274 law graduates were Javanese.
About 20 or more were Sundanese. Among the rest were perhaps 15 Mi-
nangkabau, 10 Batak, 20 from other areas of Sumatra, 10 or 15 from
various parts of Sulawesi, 2 or 3 from Kalimantan, and the remainder
from Bali, Ambon and elsewhere. Javanese were overrepresented--less
than 50 percent of the population in the 1930 census but 64 percent of
all ethnic Indonesian lawyers--but this is not surprising given their
earlier start in legal education. What is striking is the speed with
which Sumatrans (13 percent of the population, 12.7 percent of lawyers)
took up law, while Sundanese (18 percent of the population, 7 percent
of lawyers) lagged behind despite their apparent geographic advantage.

26. Indisch Verslag II (1927), p. 76. That the emancipation of middle and upper
class women of all population groups had made headway, and that legal work
seemed promising to them, is indicated by the enrollment of ten women women in
the law faculty in 1927: six were Dutch, two ethnic Chinese, and two Indone-
sian. By 1940, according to the "Indonesian Jurists" list (see below, n. 27),
nine Indonesian women had law degrees, four from Leiden and five from the
Rechtshogeschool.
27. Entitled simply "Indonesian Jurists," the list indicates the university and date
of each lawyer's degree and the position held during the occupation period. It
is in English, indicating that it was put together for Japanese officials, but
there is no date on it. The document was found among the papers of the late
Professor Supomo in the Ministry of Justice in Jakarta. I am grateful to the
ministry for permitting me to go through his papers.
28. A Faculty of Indology (Indonesian studies) was established at the University of
Utrecht in the 1920s. Supported largely by conservative Dutch business inter-
ests, it was intended to counter the liberal and pro-Indonesian views of the
Leiden faculty. While it never overshadowed Leiden, Utrecht did attract a few
Indonesian students.

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148

The extent to which law was an aristocratic preserve is indicated

by the rank titles of names on the list. Of the 175 Javanese lawyers,
30 used the low title of mas and 135 had royal ranks of raden, raden
mas, or higher. Aristocratic titles among lawyers from Sumatra and
other islands were no less common. The colonial government, after all,
had originally intended to provide legal education only to the upper-
most part of the Javanese (and later Indonesian) elite. Its purpose
was not to encourage social mobility, which would have threatened the
old aristocracy, and cost more, but to equip this elite with the modern
means by which to maintain its place in the civil service. For an
aristocracy interested in maintaining its political and bureaucratic
status, law became an obvious place to go.

With legal education available, the second factor of change that

was necessary to produce an Indonesian advocacy had to do with atti-
tudes towards government service. By the time the first rechtskundigen
left for Leiden, during the late 1910s and early 1920s, social, politi-
cal, and intellectual change in the colony was beginning to create a
moral environment reasonably hospitable to young men who might choose
to work outside the government. New educational policies were creating
a more diverse Indonesian elite. There were doctors, teachers, techni-
cians, intellectuals, and new civil servants--though not many in all--
as well as the traditional bureaucratic class. A stratum of middle and
lower priyayi professionals began gradually to take shape.29 Liberal
ideas were abundant, and some young Javanese students and intellectuals
were in touch with sympathetic Dutch teachers and officials. While the
conviction that priyayi sons should follow their fathers into the
bureaucracy generally remained very strong, it undoubtedly became
slightly less compelling as new opportunities arose. What may have
been most important, however, was the emergence of the nationalist
movement. In 1908 Boedi Oetomo (High Endeavor) was organized and at-
tracted thousands of educated Javanese civil servants and young stu-
dents to its politically conservative but culturally appealing program.
Several early Indonesian advocates were once members. Its influence
lasted briefly, but within the next two decades all the prototypes were
formed of the major political parties that dominated Indonesian poli-
tics through independence until the mid-1960s. The Islamic party Sare-
kat Islam was first in 1912, the Communist party (PKI) followed in
1920, and Sukarno and others formed the Nationalist party (PNI, Partai
Nasional Indonesia) in 1927. Before 1920 Indonesian independence was
already an issue.3O

Nationalism and anti-colonialism made it more than acceptable in

some circles to refuse to work for the colonial government. Indonesian
political organizations, educational foundations, social movements,
student groups, and writers began in these years to promote symbols of
self-awareness, of noncooperation with the colonial government, and of
the capacity of Indonesians to run their own affairs.31 Young nation-
alists were deeply aware of colonial stratification, by which most
Indonesians inevitably occupied the lowest rungs of social and economic

29. See Robert Van Niel, The Emergence of the Modern Indonesian Elite (The Hague
and Bandung: van Hoeve, 1960), pp. 31-72.
30. On the development of the nationalist movement in Indonesia, see George McT.
Kahin, Nationalism and Revolution in Indonesia (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1952).
31. See, for example, Ruth T. McVey, "Taman Siswa and the Indonesian National Awa
ening," Indonesia, 4 (October 1967), pp. 128-50.

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 149

ladders, behind the Dutch, Indo-Europeans, Chinese, and nearly everyone

else. Even among those who did not join nationalist organizations, but
who resented the humiliating status of "natives," working for the colo-
nial administration began to seem morally irritating. Nevertheless,
about 80 to 90 percent of Indonesian graduate lawyers did accept gov-
ernment positions, some but not all out of prior obligation. For most
this was the reason for studying law in the first place. But the al-
ternative of private practice was no longer unimaginable.

The first Indonesian lawyers to take the chance made, or started

to make, their decisions in Holland. Their experience there gave them
a view of new career models divorced from the colonial context and, at
the same time, perhaps a new perspective on themselves that did not
occur readily in the social environment at home in Java. According to
one early advocate, Mr. Iskaq Cokrohadisuryo:

He left Java for Holland with every intention of returning to become

a judge. But Holland was a new experience, and one that made a deep
impact on him. He discovered in Holland a new sense of self-appre-
ciation. In Java itself Javanese were considered lowly, all the
more so in the eyes of the Dutch. In Holland Javanese were appre-
ciated as people. He learned to value himself, and began to under-
stand that he would never be able to work for the government again.
(September 3, 1971)32

In the comparatively liberating atmosphere of Holland there was a minor

explosion of interest in private practice among the earliest Indonesian
law students. This at least is what available statistics indicate.
Among the first forty-five students who took their degrees at the law
faculty in Leiden, no fewer than sixteen or seventeen became advocates
after returning to Indonesia.33 At no time since then has the propor-
tion of lawyers entering private practice been anywhere near as large.

In part, this was due to the apparent accessibility of the advo-

cacy to Indonesian lawyers once the first office was opened. But more
important were political and ideological factors. Students who left
Java for Leiden around 1920 did so at a time of considerable national-
ist activity and political conflict in the colony, which spread to
Indonesian students in Holland. Soon after arriving in Leiden several
law students immersed themselves in politics and were among the found-
ing members of the Perhimpunan Indonesia (PI, Indonesian Association),
a nationalist association organized in 1922 out of the remains of more
innocuous Indonesian student organizations in Holland. Those involved
--among them R. M. Sartono, Iwa Kusumasumantri, Ali Sastroamijoyo, and
R. Sastromulyono, all of whom became advocates--may have burned their

32. All indented material is directly from my interview notes. I have made gram-
matical changes and occasionally rearranged sentences to put them in better
order. The date of the interview is indicated in parentheses.
33. This figure was reconstructed from the "Indonesian Jurists" document and other
biographical information collected from various sources. Among the earliest to
go into private practice after Leiden were M. Besar Martokusumo, M. Sumardi, R.
Sastromulyono, R. Panji Singgih, M. Said Suwono, R. Suyudi, A. A. Maramis, R.
Gatot Tarunamiharja, R. M. Sartono, R. Budiarto, R. Wiryono Kusumo, R. P. Iskaq
Cokrohadisuryo, R. Iwa Kusumasumantri, M. Sunaryo, J. Latuharhary, R. Ali Sas-
troamijoyo, M. A. Yusuf. Not all remained advocates for very long, but most did
until the Japanese occupation. I have used the number of forty-five lawyers and
1928 as cutoff points because thereafter Rechtshogeschool graduates enter the
picture and because by then the Indonesian advocacy was already established.

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150

bridges so far as government employment was concerned. Even if this

had not been the case, however, their own ideological temper by this
time would have made it difficult to return home to quiet jobs in land-
raden. Some of the tension of student politics in Holland comes
through in an interview with the late R. M. Sartono, a descendant of
the Mangkunegaran royal house, who graduated from the Rechtsschool and
went to Leiden in 1922:

He fooled around a lot in Leiden, and seldom went to lectures; he

borrowed class notes from [Abdulgafar] Pringgodigdo. And he traveled
a bit. Some of his teachers excited him. Professor Krabbe, for one,
got to him with the analysis that law is above everything and that
the ultimate source of law is whoever rules. But it was van Vollen-
hoven whom he respected most and whom he still regards as the great-
est of law professors. Van Vollenhoven was an honorary member of the
Perhimpunan Indonesia. He sat in on PI meetings and even paid for
his own subscription to the PI journal. But in 1923, when the PI met
to decide upon noncooperation with the colonial government, van Vol-
lenhoven, who sat courteously through the meeting, left at the end
and never returned. Perhaps van Vollenhoven worried that conserva-
tive professors in Holland would have attacked Leiden, but also he
probably did not agree with noncooperation. The decision caused much
argument within the organization, though it was not fully an open
dispute, because there were not many Indonesian students who dared
to oppose the movement for independence. But many of the law stu-
dents were already civil servants, and their way to Leiden was being
paid by the government. For them it was difficult. Moreover, fami-
lies back in the colony were sometimes threatened. Sartono's own
father, who worked in the government, was asked why his son was be-
having badly in Holland. Fortunately nothing came of it, and his
family continued to pay his way. (October 27, 1964)

Still, any young Javanese willing to become an advocate then had

to be unusual. The difficulties were for the most part professional
and social, rather than financial. None of the new advocates was hope-
lessly poor. Most came from reasonably well-off and well-connected
priyayi families. But professionally a new Indonesian advocate had to
take his chances in a field dominated by Dutch lawyers linked comfort-
ably with Dutch commerce in a system of legal institutions fully con-
trolled by Dutch officials. The derision of Dutch advocates alone
might have put off a less determined candidate. Often he had to be
committed enough to put up also with his family's opposition, more or
less outspoken, to working outside the bureaucracy. Despite the na-
tionalist movement, it was still government, not private practice or
commerce, where the old elite found social status and security.

The first Indonesian advocate was Mr. Besar Martokusumo (a model

for some of these attributes), who was also instrumental in helping
other Indonesian advocates to get started. The following biographical
excerpts are largely in his words, from interviews and conversations,
though my notes have been rearranged here and there for the sake of
clarity and relevance.

Mr. Besar was born in 1893 in Brebes, north coast Central Java.
His father was a jaksa, who earned about 150 guilders a month. The
two children were sent to live with an elderly Dutch woman in Peka-
longan, where they could learn to use Dutch well; this was the only
way to assure them a Dutch education. Mr. Besar is deeply grateful
to this woman, a totok (not born in the Indies). During the Japanese
occupation, when he was mayor of Pekalongan, she was arrested and he

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 151

was able to help her. She died in Bogor during the occupation.
After the war he went to Bogor to look for her; he found her grave,
moved it, and fixed it up nicely.
After MULO [Dutch-language junior high school] Besar was admitted
to the Rechtsschool in 1909. As he thinks back on it, he is impressed
with the Rechtsschool education and its products. Nearly all the
students had to live in a dormitory, with a Dutch woman caring for
the house, which was presided over by one of the Rechtsschool teach-
ers, a judge from the "Hof," or some similarly high official. The
schedule was strict. They awoke early to bathe, eat, and off to lec-
tures. Then back to the dormitory for study in the early afternoon,
food, a nap, a walk in the Koninginsplein, back to study. He laughed
as he recounted how they were taught to eat with Dutch manners,
taught to dance. . . . Rechtsschool lasted six years, all of it like
that. The main emphasis of study was in criminal law. It was sup-
posed then that Indonesian judges would be used only for criminal
cases.

He mentioned the differences between the Rechtsschool and the

medical school for Indonesian students. Rechtsschool students got
twenty-five guilders a month, private rooms in the dormitory, good
food, and a good introduction to Dutch culture. Medical students
got fifteen guilders a month, slept many to the room, dressed slop-
pily, and got poor food and care. His younger brother was in medical
school and was quite poorly off. The reason for the difference was
that law students were the cream of the crop. Many were regents'
sons and the sons of very well-to-do priyayi. They had to represent
the government eventually.
After Rechtsschool, Besar was an Official Seconded [ATB, Ambte-
naar Ter Beschikking] to the landraad in Pekalongan. He worked
mainly as a sessions clerk. The chairman was Dutch, of course, but
a very good fellow who was something of a bon vivant and thought
highly of Besar. . . . The training at the landraad was excellent.
But at the time there were no Indonesian court chairmen. The highest
an Indonesian could go was vice-chairman. Most members of the court,
other than the chairman, were Indonesian or Dutch pensioners. He
earned about a hundred guilders a month at the landraad.
Having worked a few years as ATB in the landraad, Besar [and
eleven others] decided to go to Holland for a law degree. This was
unheard of at the time, and before he went one Dutchman said that an
Indonesian couldn't take a law degree in a hundred years. [This was
in 1920.] But there was encouragement too, particularly from Pro-
fessor Hazeu, then advisor for native affairs; he wasa very sympa-
thetic man, who sometimes went to the kampung to talk with parents
of hopeful students. . . . There were already a few Indonesians
studying in Holland, all of them sons of regents. And all of them
had too much money and lived too royally to get through.34 Maybe it
was for this reason that no one expected Indonesians to be able to
complete their degrees, even apart from general Dutch contempt for
Indonesians. . . . But it was different with the twelve students who
now decided to go, Besar among them, and also Gondokusumo, Kusuma-
atmaja [Indonesia's first Supreme Court chairman] and others ...
No one helped them, according to Mrs. Besar, such was the Dutch

34. Actually, one Javanese law student did finish his degree at Leiden before any
of the Rechtsschool graduates arrived there. He was Raden Mas Gondowinoto, who
took a degree in Netherlands law science in 1918 and later worked in the Mangku-
negaran. "Indonesian Jurists."

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152

opposition to this kind of thing. No one told Besar that it would be

cold, or where to stay. He arrived in Holland in shirtsleeves with
one big wooden box, not knowing where to go or what to do. Besar
paid his own way at Leiden. He got help from his family, especially
from his younger brother, by this time a doctor, and from a friend.
He later helped his younger brother and friend to continue their edu-
cations in Holland.35

Anyway, the twelve Indonesian students who arrived in Holland

impressed everyone. They were all Rechtsschool graduates and knew
their law. They were permitted to take their exams whenever they
felt ready. Gondokusumo finished in six months, much to everybody's
surprise.36 Another student finished in a year or two. Besar com-
pleted his degree in three years.
Leiden was a new experience. Indonesians were rare there at the
time and little children used to follow them around inquiring who
they were, Negroes or what? Gondokusumo worked very hard . . . and
spent all his time reading. But Besar apparently lived it up much
more. He saw movies and went dancing. .. . He knew van Vollenhoven
and thought very highly of him. . . . But he refused to take the
Indology course, his view being that he naturally knew about Indone-
sian adat law, so why study it.37 Moreover, he was already thinking

35. As mentioned earlier, the government paid for many Indonesian students to go to
Holland as civil servants with an obligation to return to the civil service.
But some paid their own way, either because the government would not support
them or because they chose to be independent. While I have no direct evidence
on the matter, and not all students who paid their own way became advocates, it
seems almost certain that most students who later became advocates were private-
ly financed. They had no legal or moral obligation to work in the civil ser-
vice. It was not unusual for a student to go to Holland with financial help
from a friend, and on his return to help the friend follow in his footsteps.
36. This was not Jody Gondokusumo, an advocate and later minister of justice in the
independent state. This Gondokusumo was van Vollenhoven's first Indonesian stu-
dent to complete a doctorate in Netherlands Indies law (as well as Netherlands
law), in 1922. Van Vollenhoven was evidently deeply touched by the conferral
of the degree; see the biography of van Vollenhoven by Henriette, L.T. de Beau-
fort, Cornelis van Vollenhoven: 1874-1933 (Haarlem: Tjeenk Willink, 1955), pp.
189-90.

37. At Leiden law students could take degrees in Netherlands law, Netherlands Indies
law, or both. The Netherlands Indies law course included work in adat law, one
of van Vollenhoven's principal interests (along with international law, for
which he was best known in Europe), ethnology, and the like. Until 1927, most
Indonesian students took degrees in both Netherlands and Netherlands Indies law;
afterwards nearly all did their degree work only in Netherlands Indies law. By
my count a total of fourteen Indonesian students, until 1940, took degrees only
in Netherlands law. It is no coincidence, I think, that nine of these (and pos-
sibly ten or eleven) turned out to be advocates, and most were in Leiden at the
same time. They evidently agreed that studying adat law would be a waste of
their time. This may indicate that some of them were already thinking about
careers outside of government. It may also reflect a nationalist turning away
from colonially inspired conceptions of adat law--which is one implication of
Mr. Besar's comment. It is worth pointing out that many Indonesian law students
(both in Holland and Batavia) were uninterested in adat law, even when they were
required to study it. Their view of it was ambivalent: on the one hand it was
Indonesian, but, on the other, it was backward, unmodern, primitive. The same
attitudes are prevalent today. Some colonial officials worried about this, for
it seemed to them, correctly, that law students (like engineers, but not doctors)

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 153

vaguely of becoming an advocate and wisely decided to spend his time

studying Dutch law. He passed his exams in 1923. Professor Meier
in civil law was the toughest, but he has nothing but respect for
Meier, who always had time for his students. Criminal law was the
easiest, because of his six years in Rechtsschool ...
The turning point in Besar's career came after he had finished
his studies at Leiden. Gondokusumo, who had finished so quickly,
took a government job back in the colony, and he was so good that
the government agreed to give him rank and salary equal to Dutch
officials in the same capacity ... When he heard this, Besar re-
quested an audience with Minister of Colonies de Graaf . . and
asked that he too be "equalized" with Dutch officials. De Graaff
replied that he would have to think about it first and Besar, who no
longer had a place to stay in Leiden, went off to Germany where it
cost less to live. After waiting a month for word from the minister,
Besar cabled de Graaff that he had decided to go off on his own, that
he would not work for the government, and that he would pay his own
way home. So the die was cast for him as an advocate. He was bitter
against the government because of the whole question of rank and
salary distinctions between Dutch and Indonesian officials.
On returning home [1923] Besar told his family that he intended
to open private practice in Tegal. [He probably chose Tegal because
family and friends were there, and perhaps because few Dutch lawyers
were already established in the area.] His family always disliked
the idea of his becoming a pokrol,38 rather than working for the
"gubernemen." They could not understand or approve of such an occu-
pation for a man with his background. It was sinking to a low level
indeed not to go into the government but rather to work as an advo-
cate. The government was proper--the pamong praja--but certainly
not an occupation that was like becoming a merchant. But he opened
an office anyway, and eventually the family came to accept this,
though a bit grudgingly at first.
In time Besar's law office became highly successful, and he
opened a branch in Semarang. He took in more Indonesian lawyers,
including Sastromulyono, Suyudi, and others. For a time all members
of the new firm shared alike; each received a salary of about six
hundred guilders a month plus a share of the profits. He put a great
deal of emphasis on Indonesian advocates working together. . . . Dur-
ing the depression work became scarce and the office had to split up,
the Tegal and Semarang branches going their own ways. . . . (April
1960, October 1964).

were moving away from the "spiritual center" of their own community and thus
becoming receptive to "negative" ideological appeals--for example, no doubt,
nationalism, independence, and so forth. See the report of Director of Educa-
tion P. J. A. Idenburg to Governor-General Tjarda van Starkenborgh Stachouwer,
September 24, 1938, in van der Wal, Het Onderwijsbeleid, pp. 631-44, esp. at p.
637. The report dealt with the question of establishing a new faculty of let-
ters in Java.

38. The Indonesian term "pokrol" derives from the Dutch word procure
prepared to undertake civil law work but not yet criminal law adv
distinction between procureur and advocaat was nominally maintain
nial profession, but dropped in the independent state.) In any event, "pokrol"
is derisory, usually used in "pokrol bambu," bush-lawyer, but sometimes also
refers to a shady or sloppy lawyer, a slick manipulator, or a pettifogger.

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154

Mr. Besar broke the ice, and though the water was cold at first
he was, by all accounts, able to develop a successful practice. Had
he not done so, many who followed him might have been discouraged from
becoming advocates. It has been mentioned that law students in Perhim-
punan Indonesia, by the fact of their political activity, probably had
committed themselves to private practice while still in Leiden. Among
these, Sartono, Sastromulyono, Suyudi, and Ali Sastroamijoyo returned
to become advocates soon after Mr. Besar. Sastromulyono, Suyudi, and
Sumardi joined Besar's office. Sartono joined an office opened by
Iskaq Cokrohadisuryo in Batavia, the first Indonesian office in the
colonial capital. Iskaq had returned to Java in 1926. During the
next few years, as he moved from place to place for professional,
political, and personal reasons, he established some of the earliest
Indonesian law offices outside of Java.

Iskaq was born in 1896 in Surabaya, East Java. He entered the

Rechtsschool in 1911 and graduated in 1917; he still remembers his
Rechtsschool teachers. After graduating he worked as a clerk in
various landraden in Java, and then in 1922 went to Leiden. While
there he was not politically active. He did not join Perhimpunan
Indonesia because he worked at the stock market and feared he might
lose his job. But he was deeply interested in politics and had close
friends in the PI. During his three years in Leiden Iskaq decided
that he could not work for the colonial government. He knew that he
had to join the nationalist movement and work for Indonesian indepen-
dence, and the best way to do this was to be his own man, free of
government service. So he decided to become an advocate.
When he came back to Java in 1926, Mr. Besar had already set up
offices in Tegal and Semarang. Iskaq opened an office in Batavia.
Sartono joined him along with at least two others, one of whom was
Wiryono Kusumo [later a judge on the Indonesian supreme court].
Iskaq was married to a Dutch woman at the time and felt that she
would be better off living in Bandung. Leaving Sartono in charge,
he moved to Bandung, establishing a new law office there. [This
office cooperated closely with Mr. Besar's offices in Tegal and
Semarang.] In 1929 he was arrested along with Sukarno and others as
a result of their PNI activities. He was detained for a time and
then freed on condition he did not return to Bandung-Batavia. Mov-
ing to Surabaya, he opened the first Indonesian law office in that
city. Within a year he left for Makasar on a case and found promis-
ing work there and the prospect of more income. In Makasar he
brought Sunaryo [later foreign minister and Indonesian ambassador to
England] into his office, which he then left to Sunaryo and went to
Menado, in north Sulawesi, where there were even more cases. So he
opened another office, into which he brought Mr. Sujono. In 1933 he
returned to Surabaya, reestablished his old office, and brought some
recent Indonesian law graduates into it. (November 13, 1964)

None of the early Indonesian law offices was very large. Mr.
Besar's in Tegal and Semarang, and Mr. Iskaq's in Batavia were the most
substantial, but it is unlikely that any single office employed more
than six or seven advocates at one time. They did not have the large
corporate clienteles that would have allowed them to grow much further,
and by the late 1920s and early 1930s the depression had evidently re-
duced the volume of smaller casework on which they depended, or rather
reduced the likelihood that people would pay for advocates to manage
their cases.

Nearly all of the Indonesian advocates, at first mainly Javanese,

knew one another well and cooperated professionally and politically.

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 155

They had to, for professionally they were not embraced by the community
of Dutch advocates and politically they were of course at odds with the
government. Indonesian advocates frequently sent work to one another
in different cities. From Tegal and Semarang Mr. Besar's offices sent
cases that had to be tried in the Batavia raad van justitie or the
Hooggerechtshof to the Iskaq-Sartono office. They also lent help to
colleagues and friends in trouble. When Mr. Gatot Tarunamiharja, a
maverick in both Holland and Java, was suspended from practice as an
advocate by the Hooggerechtshof because of his political and other
activities, one of Mr. Besar's offices took him on as a legal assistant
over the objections of colonial judicial officials. Iskaq's office in
Batavia, a PNI bastion, was the most politically involved. Besar
joined no party, devoting himself almost entirely to professional ad-
vocacy, but others in his offices were active. (The politics of Indo-
nesian advocates will be taken up again shortly.)

Javanese advocates were the first, and before long they were work-
ing in the commercial cities of the outer islands too, but by the late
1920s and 1930s lawyers from Sumatra (and possibly elsewhere) had also
begun private practice. Not all of these advocates were necessarily
committed professionally to the advocacy. It may be that by the de-
pression years there were actually more law graduates, few as they
were, than the government was willing or able to absorb. Like law
faculties later on in the independent state, the Rechtshogeschool, or
Leiden for those who could afford it, undoubtedly attracted many stu-
dents who had no taste for the technical faculties and sought to pre-
pare themselves broadly for government jobs.39 Consequently, some
lawyers everywhere in the colony took up private practice now and then
if they could not find or keep government positions. Not all of them
were successful as advocates, and when government work became available
they took it. Holding these points in mind, it is nevertheless strik-
ing, if I have used the data well, that Sumatrans moved disproportion-
ately into private law practice. It has already been mentioned that
for some reason, perhaps the same as applied in Java, Sumatrans took
to law rather quickly. By 1940, while Sumatrans made up nearly 13 per-
cent of all lawyers, approximating their proportion of the total popu-
lation of Indonesia, they constituted nearly 30 percent of the ethnic
Indonesian advocates. The data is uncertain, but there may have then
been at least seven advocates of Minangkabau origin, four Batak (Toba,
Simelungun, and Mandailing), three Acehnese, and two from South Suma-
tra, for a total of sixteen or so, while Javanese advocates numbered
more than thirty but less than forty.40
Several factors may account for this. One is that the colonial
bureaucracy was not so highly developed in Sumatra as in Java and
therefore provided fewer opportunities for lawyers. In addition, how-
ever, for Sumatrans, including the high-born who studied law, status
probably did not attach to bureaucratic position per se to the same
extent as it did for Javanese. Moreover, in West Sumatra particularly
but also elsewhere, market crops and trading had become the foundation
of a rising middle class that may well have begun to provide stimulus,
encouragement, status, and even some work for private lawyers.41 The

39. I am indebted to Benedict Anderson for calling my attention to this point and
several others.

40. Estimated, emphatically, from "Indonesian Jurists" and other biographical infor-
mation.

41. See W. F. Wertheim, Indonesian Society in Transition (2nd ed. rev.; The Hague
and Bandung: van Hoeve, 1959), pp. 141ff.

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156

social atmosphere of Sumatra's commercial cities would not have dis-

courages the sons of either the old aristocracy or the new middle class
from becoming advocates. Finally, all of the Sumatrans and other non-
Javanese who decided to study law had to go to Batavia or Holland. In
either case they would normally have spent considerable time in Java,
studying in suitable schools, before applying to the Rechtshogeschool
or Leiden. Living in Java for years implied a break with their own
clan-organized societies (especially the Batak and Minangkabau) that
Javanese students seldom experienced so intensely. Some, like Muhammad
Yamin, later a prominent nationalist scholar and ideologue, stayed per-
manently in Java, along with many other Minangkabau students, profes-
sionals, businessmen and political leaders. They were obvious examples,
even models, of the process of Sumatran (particularly Minangkabau) "in-
dividuation" that Dutch scholars made much of in the 1930s. For those
who returned to Sumatra as lawyers, with the cosmopolitanizing experi-
ence of Java behind them, not only would private practice have more
appeal, but for some it was the only apparent option.

Ethnic Chinese advocates also began to appear by the late 1920s.

Nearly all were from peranakan families, born in Indonesia rather than
China. Educational facilities for Indonesian Chinese had improved
greatly since the nineteenth century, and many young Chinese men and
women now attended Dutch-language schools. As ethnic Chinese commerce
developed, moreover, the traditional middleman role produced a dynamic
and growing middle class, socially and culturally much closer to the
Dutch than to Indonesians. Nevertheless, ethnic Chinese came late to
the private legal profession. Unlike Javanese priyayi, they received
no government encouragement to go into law, and the near monopoly of
non-Dutch government service by ethnic Indonesians gave young ethnic
Chinese little reason to study law in the first place. But for the
same reason, when ethnic Chinese students did take an interest in law,
the advocacy was an obvious goal. While a few did eventually take
positions in the colonial courts and central administration, most found
as advocates that they had a natural economic base in Chinese commerce,
which provided them with business contacts, support, and a reasonably
permanent clientele.

For both ethnic Indonesian and ethnic Chinese advocates, starting

practice was hard. While occasionally they got useful advice from a
sympathetic Dutch advocate, by and large they were shunned. Many Dutch
advocates evidently perceived them as a competitive threat. It was
nearly impossible for the newcomers to find places in established Dutch
law firms. An ethnic Chinese advocate from Surabaya commented on this
problem:

Having finished his degree at Leiden, he returned to Surabaya in

about 1938, and tried to get a position with several Dutch law firms.
All of them politely but firmly turned him down. When the Japanese
came, and all Dutch lawyers had either left the country or been in-
terned, he moved into an old Dutch law office. In the archives of
this office he found documents indicating clearly that Dutch law
firms had decided not to allow Chinese or Indonesian advocates to
get started nor to give them any help at all. All of this was evi-
dent in office letters and minutes of meetings in which Dutch advo-
cates discussed the problem. They knew that once Chinese and Indone-
sian advocates established themselves, Dutch law firms would suffer
badly. Thus, in East Java his own family owned one or two large
companies that were clients of a Dutch law firm. The same law firm
handled the legal business of other large Chinese companies. A
family that owned one of these companies tried to persuade the law

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 157

firm to take on a young relation who had finished law school; they
offered to pay his salary so that he could get experience. But the
law firm rejected the boy. They were obviously afraid that Chinese
advocates would soon take over all the legal business of these com-
panies. (November 29, 1971)

The experience was not unusual. It meant that new advocates, unless
they could join an Indonesian firm, had to start from scratch without
experience or clients. There were also slights. Most Indonesian (and
ethnic Chinese) advocates who began practice in the colony can recount
instances of real or imagined discrimination. Where there were local
advocates' associations, they could not join or found it difficult to
do so. Some were burdened with an extraordinary number of pro-deo
(pro-bono) indigent cases, often, they suspected, because Dutch advo-
cates refused to take them and advised the local raad van justitie to
appoint Indonesian advocates. In the memories of older Indonesian
advocates today personal humiliations experienced while getting started
are mixed with a more precisely nationalistic animus against colonial
treatment of Indonesians. In the following typical interview one can
see this and, in addition, the kind of personal commitment that advo-
cates often developed to their private vocation.

Sudarno was born to a high priyayi family in Solo. His parents

worked in the palace of the Kasunanan. Of course they wanted him to
follow suit, and he was taught that he must grow up to be a good
priyayi. But even when fairly young, he really didn't like the idea.
He disliked the subordination of government service. At an early
age [late 1920s] he was also inclined to nationalism and anticolo-
nialism. In any event, he had an excellent primary and secondary
education in Dutch schools, and applied to the faculties of medicine
and law. But he came from a family many of whose members went into
law. He was related to Susanto Tirtoprojo [minister of justice dur-
ing the revolution] and his brother Wiryono Projodikoro [second
chairman of the supreme court in the independent state] and his uncle
was Professor Jokosutono [dean of the law faculty of the University
of Indonesia, now deceased]. They convinced him to go to the Rechts-
hogeschool; this was in 1933, during the malaisetijd of depression
and unrest.

He considered the advocacy even before graduating. He saw Dutch

advocates making a good living, and if they could, why couldn't he
in his own land. Also, by this time a few Indonesian advocates were
already doing well, or at least working: Iskaq, Sujono, and others.
So he went to Surabaya, where Iskaq formally introduced him to the
raad van justitie. The practice then was for a new advocate to go
around to pay respects to established advocates in the city. Sudar-
no's feelings were badly hurt by one advocate, an Indo-European, who
said, "So, you are brave enough to start now when conditions are so
bad." The implication, he thought, was that no native could make it.
But, after all, there were hotels where an Indonesian landraad chair-
man could not get in. And while high Indonesians might sit on the
ground at a meeting, the lowest Dutchman would sit on a chair.'2

42. It was not only ethnic Indonesians who experienced colonial discrimination. One
of Jakarta's best known and most effective advocates, of Chinese descent, spoke
of his youth thus: "As a child in Kebumen [in Central Java] I became aware of
the discrimination of colonialism. In the bupati's office, for example, and in
other offices, where everyone else had to be so polite and proper, Dutch offi-
cials--including advocates--acted as they pleased, with their feet on the tables
and so on. This greatly angered me. When I went to the ELS [Europeesche Lagere
School, Dutch-language primary school] in Bandung, the teacher once called me to

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158

During the Japanese occupation he remained an advocate. There

was no work, but at least he didn't have to become a pegawai (civil
servant). Indeed, he refused the opportunity to become one. To be-
come a pegawai at that time was to associate with brutality against
one's own people; it was just another form of colonialism. (Novem-
ber 30, 1971)

Once established in practice, many of the new advocates were able

to survive professionally, though it has to be kept in mind that most
of them had family support to fall back on in hard times. None broke
into very large-scale corporate work during the colonial period. But
ethnic Chinese advocates were able increasingly to draw a commercial
clientele from the Chinese community. And ethnic Indonesian advocates,
while less securely based in any entrepreneurial group, nevertheless
found ample work in criminal litigation, private business claims, land
disputes, inheritance, and other family issues among Indonesians and,
for that matter, Europeans and ethnic Chinese. Clienteles were not
rigidly defined in ethnic terms by any means, and still are not. A
few advocates--among them Mr. Besar and Mr. Iskaq--developed lucrative
practices and strong professional reputations. Some specialized; Ali
Sastroamijoyo, a future PNI prime minister, for one, concentrated on
land law issues in East Java. Most ranged further.

One external reason for their moderate success was the integrity
of the colonial judicial system. While Indonesian advocates received
little help from Dutch advocates, in the courts themselves they were
apparently accorded all the courtesies due to full-fledged participants
in the judicial process. Whatever personal prejudices Dutch judges may
have had, these seem to have been overridden in their institutional
work. On this point older Indonesian advocates almost universally
agree, though they may overstate the matter by contrast with judicial
problems after independence. Even as they became fervent nationalists
Indonesian advocates developed a strong sense of commitment to the
legal system that gave form to their careers. A typical comment was
by Mr. Besar:

When in private practice, he was respected by Dutch judges. With

a note of pride, he said that in the raad van justitie he attacked
the officieren van justitie and won his points too. It was his duty
to defend his clients and he did so. He was not afraid to challenge
the arguments of an officier van justitie. . . . In the landraden, of
course, he didn't have to bother much with the jaksa. . . . The pre-
war courts paid honest and important attention to advocates, and it
was understood that the advocate was also an agent in the search for
justice. The judge accepted the advocate as a necessary and benefi-
cial functionary in the judicial system. Advocates--he himself,
other Indonesian advocates, and Dutch advocates--all fought their
cases to find justice, to protect their clients. The advocate, in-
cluding the Indonesian advocate in his own community in time, was re-
spected and held a place of honor. (April 12, 1960)43

the front with the words 'Come here you little Chinese,' and referred to me as
'little descendant of the middle Kingdom' and sometimes more invidious things.
And back in Kebumen Dutch officials and Dutch people called me 'Chinese' in in-
sulting ways" (November 17, 1971).
43. Mr. Besar's comment here has to be understood against the background of what
happened to the advocacy in the independent state. To be brief, it declined
precipitately. One mark of the decline was that advocates began to lose status

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 159

This was true particularly of the courts for Europeans. It was

from their association with these courts that advocates drew prestige
and professional standing. They often appeared too in the landraden,
but there was no great professional challenge there: advocates were
not required in the landraden, as they were in the raad van justitie.
Moreover, landraden were frequently associated, in advocates' minds,
with humiliating treatment of Indonesians. Mr. Besar described it
thus:

In pro-deo cases before the raad van justitie advocates were

appointed by the court, but in the landraden an official (ambtenaar
ter beschikking) of the court itself would normally act as defense
counsel for indigent defendants. Besar often helped Indonesians in
these cases. The landraad judge spoke Dutch, and the jaksa trans-
lated for him.44 The indictment was in Dutch, for the judge wrote
it himself, and it was translated for the accused. Police officers
spoke in Indonesian [or Javanese] which the jaksa translated for the
judge. Mr. Besar laughed as he mentioned that when the Dutch judge
was angry, the jaksa also had to look angry while interpreting. He
agreed that it was hard for Indonesians to regard such courts as
their own. After all, the judge was a foreigner, used a foreign
language, and so on. In criminal cases before the landraad, the
accused Indonesian from a village sat on the floor, bowed low, and
was very afraid.45 [Mr. Besar said all this with evident distaste
for the way Indonesians had to grovel before the court.] Other Indo-
nesian officials on the court called the judge kanjeng tuan [on the
order of "noble sire"]--not only the jaksa but also the Indonesian
pensioners who served as member judges in the collegial court.
(November 20, 1964)

in court, where judges often treated them antagonistically as not quite legiti-
mate members of the judicial system. Conflict between public and private legal
roles became much sharper than it ever was in the colonial legal system.
44. During the late 1920s and 1930s, however, a number of Indonesian lawyers became
landraad judges all over the colony, and they used either Indonesian or a local
language in court sessions. Moreover, there were Dutch judges who were excel-
lently trained in Leiden and were fluent in Indonesian, Javanese, and other re-
gional languages. B. ter Haar, for example, the famous adat scholar, served as
a landraad judge in Purwokerto. There were also Dutch judges who could not use
any Indonesian languages well enough to proceed with them in sessions.
45. In an illustrated popular history of Surabaya, published in 1931 for the silver
jubilee of the city, there is a photograph of a landraad sitting, probably from
the 1890s or early 1900s. Behind the bendh sits a Dutch judge, on his left a
Dutch clerk and on his right an Indonesian jaksa. On the left and right of the
bench, which is a long table, sit seven Indonesian officials and an Islamic
penghulu, who was always present at landraad sessions. Behind one of the Indo-
nesian officials stands a bearer of the umbrella that marks high rank, and be-
side him a policeman. Before the bench, on the floor, are the accused and six
witnesses. G. H. von Faber, Oud Soerabaia (Surabaya: By the city administra-
tion, 1931), p. 94. In later years many of the officials disappeared, but
otherwise landraden sessions remained the same. Symbolically, the landraad com-
bined the authority of both Dutch and Indonesian elites, and it must have had a
very imposing effect on Indonesian defendants. The original reason for having
litigants sit on the floor may have had to do with the rule of propriety in
Java that one's head must never be above that of a superior, and the presence
of Javanese officials on the court. It may have continued as a custom of the
courts because it clearly reinforced the Dutch judges' status.

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160

At this point a fuller professional, social, and political profile

of pre-war Indonesian advocates may be useful in order to try to under-
stand them as an item of change in modern Indonesian history. As a
group, given how few of them there were, they were remarkably influen-
tial later on in the revolution and especially during the parliamentary
period of the independent state. The parliamentary system (1950-57)
was in some ways peculiarly theirs, in the sense that they wanted it,
helped to make it, were politically prominent in it, and, when it
failed, disappeared politically with it. (Under Guided Democracy advo-
cates were barely in evidence politically, and professionally they were
seriously depressed. In the New Order they returned professionally
with the economic boom, and politically too, in a minor way, though no
longer as government leaders.) The parliamentary system carried over
into independence the institutions with which they were most comfort-
able, and seemed for a time to emphasize the kinds of economic and
social change to which, by their professional skills and character,
they were most obviously oriented. By and large, advocates were not a
comfortable part of the old priyayi (or other aristocratic) order.
They grew out of that order socially, and were not rabidly hostile to
it, but their career choices went against its grain and their profes-
sional role was basically a new one in Indonesian economic and politi-
cal organization. The early advocates were an unintended consequence
of the economic and political as well as educational changes imposed
upon Indonesia by the Dutch. This was not true in quite the same way
of other Indonesian lawyers who became judges, administrators, and
legal scholars. The difference between public and private vocation was
crucial. Those who worked for the government were in one sense merely
"modernizing" traditional bureaucratic roles, and they could be and
were called by old titles that eased any transitional discomfort. Not
so with advocates, who were outside the old patrimonial tradition and
did not fit its institutional style. Advocates undoubtedly accommo-
dated to this style, and were somehow accommodated by it, but profes-
sionally they did not speak the language of informal compromise and
prerogatives of authority, but that of legal rights, procedural formal-
ity, and institutional controls. They were (and still are) among Indo-
nesia's most articulate spokesmen for transforming Indonesian patrimo-
nialism into an Indonesian version of the liberal state. There is no
point in exaggerating their conscious commitments to a bourgeois revo-
lution or anything of the sort. Professional and political differences
aside, they were not bourgeois, but more or less aristocratic profes-
sionals, in the process perhaps, with others, of a mild metamorphosis
into an uppermiddle-class professional stratum. And they were not in
any real sense social revolutionaries, but rather gradualists who did
nonetheless have a fairly exact sense of the changes they wanted to
promote in Indonesian social, political, and economic organization.

The original class of Indonesian advocates was small, in part be-

cause the structure of the colonial economy would not support that many
and also because few young Indonesians with the wherewithal to study
law were prepared to take the leap from government employment to a pri-
vate career. The total population of trained Indonesian (including
ethnic Chinese) lawyers was miniscule. In 1940, when Indonesia had
about seventy million people, there were probably about 350 (non-Dutch)
trained lawyers, including at least 274 ethnic Indonesians and (an
estimate only) 50 to 75 ethnic Chinese: approximately one lawyer per
two hundred thousand people. The majority of these lawyers worked in
the judicial service or general administration of the colony. At a
guess, there were about 50 ethnic Indonesians and 20 ethnic Chinese who

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 161

practiced as advocates at some time during the 1920s and 1930s. Not
all remained private lawyers. Some entered the government bureaucracy
after a short time. Others devoted themselves to politics. Yet as
many as twenty-two ethnic Indonesians remained advocates even during
the emaciatingly lean years of the Japanese occupation.46
The new advocates shared significant characteristics that adhered
to or derived from their professional role. In terms of Indonesian
culture, they were relatively independent, even individualistic. Like
European attorneys, moreover, their work was rooted in urban economic
and social activity. Much grew from these roots. Though to a lesser
extent than their Dutch and ethnic Chinese colleagues, ethnic Indone-
sian advocates participated in the world of colonial commerce and
civil relations. More than any other single group of Indonesian pro-
fessionals, advocates (and, later, Indonesian notaries) understood the
workings of capitalist business and finance, and were involved in it.
They might still receive payment in kind, but this was nearly as likely
to include corporate shares as rice, fruit, and chickens. Many owned
land, but they also became investors and a few joined the boards of
insurance companies and the like, in which they retained some partici-
pation after the revolution. Information of this kind is difficult to
come by, but in his trial on charges of malfeasance while minister of
economic affairs in the early 1950s, Iskaq Cokrohadisuryo made his
financial situation public. Among other sources of income he reported
his services as president (presiden komisaris) of the board of a phar-
maceutical corporation in Surabaya, dividends from a bank and various
commercial firms, and a substantial holding of shares in an insurance
company in the Netherlands.47 A general interest in corporate finance
and investment was not at all rare among Indonesian advocates, several
of whom, particularly in the PNI, actively engaged in banking opera-
tions during the parliamentary period. From interview data there is
some evidence that many advocates were risk-takers in the economy,
which supports a few assumptions I have made about the personalities
of men who, in the colony and independent state, decided to become pri-
vate lawyers. One should not overrate their influence in the world of
private commerce, but they moved familiarly and comfortably in it; and
when it began to collapse in independent Indonesia, so did they.

Advocates were also politically committed and engaged. Like jour-

nalists and literary figures, some of whom also had legal training,
private lawyers in the colony were a highly mobilized group. Their
political prominence was out of proportion to their numbers. Here they
stood in marked contrast with all legal officials. Indonesian judges,
central administrators and so on were not deeply or consistently in-
volved in the nationalist movement, partly for the obvious reason that
government employment made them vulnerable. It is striking, however,
that during the revolution many--not all, by any means--who had been
judges and bureaucratic lawyers before the war chose to work in the re-
turning Dutch administration, while ethnic Indonesian advocates, almost
to a man, remained with the revolutionary Republic of Indonesia. Within

46. From "Indonesian Jurists." A few ethnic Chinese advocates also kept their of-
fices open, but I have no figures. There was very little for advocates to do
during the occupation. It was at this time, while the Japanese military admin-
istered Indonesia from 1942 through mid-1945, that the courts for Europeans
were eliminated and the judicial system unified for all population groups.
47. Iskaq Tjokrohadisuryo, Rasa Keadilan Berbitjara (Jakarta: Partai Nasional Indo-
nesia, 1960), pp. 66-69.

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162

the professional law community of the independent state, this divergent

political history of advocates and government lawyers caused quiet but
real tension for a time, often to the detriment of the advocates.

Part of the reason for the political prominence of advocates, as

Weber pointed out with respect to private lawyers generally, was that
they could apportion their time much more freely and flexibly than gov-
ernment lawyers.48 They were their own men, with independent incomes,
and often office incomes to support them in extraoffice activities. It
is probably also true that men with any substantial interest in poli-
tics chose the advocacy, because government appointments were unlikely
for nationalists and because, as advocates, they would be free to en-
gage in politics. In addition, however, advocates were more likely
than other lawyers to develop a refined sense of colonial injustice,
as it affected both their own careers and the interests of private In-
donesians whose cases they represented. While they appreciated the
quality of colonial legal institutions, they had no particular stake
in the colonial government. Nor were they prone to accepting the usual
run of colonial myths about native incapacities, for they themselves
had made it on their own, and few of them seem to have doubted their
own abilities eventually to run a government. Finally, their training
in the law, combined with the breadth of their concern with it, appears
in some way to have given advocates an extraordinary comprehension of
the idea of the state itself, not simply of administration or, more
widely, of government, but of the nation-state. This point does not
merit a great deal of elaboration, because the evidence is too obscure,
but it is probably worth suggesting anyway.

The nationalist politics of pre-war Indonesian advocates took var-

ious forms. Not all joined parties, but even those who did not usually
made their nationalist commitments clear, and they seem not to have
been seriously questioned. Mr. Besar, for example, never joined a
political party, but as a symbolic gesture he refused to wear the con-
ventional headgear of an advocate in court, using instead a Javanese
cap (bZangkon). Moreover, advocates in his offices were politically
active. Suyudi, for example, was head of the PNI in Central Java. It
was in Suyudi's house in Yogyakarta that Sukarno and Gatot Mangkupraja,
another PNI leader, were arrested in December 1929 for disturbing pub-
lic tranquillity with their speech-making tours across Java.49 Sukar-
no's defense counsel at his famous trial before the Bandung landraad
in 1930 consisted of Sartono, from the former Iskaq-Sartono office in
Batavia, and Sastromulyono and Suyudi, both from Mr. Besar's offices.50s

48. Weber's view of private lawyers as ,the prototype of modern professional politi-
cian" is briefly summarized by R. Bendix, Max Weber: An Intellectual Portrait
(New York: Doubleday, 1960), p. 436.
49. J. D. Legge, Sukarno: A Political Biography (New York and Washington: Praeger,
1972), pp. 107-8. There were mass arrests of PNI leaders at this time. Iskaq
also was arrested but, like many others, was soon released. Only Sukarno and
three others were brought to trial.
50. One other advocate, Idi Prawiradiputera, was on the defense team, but he was
evidently less involved than the others. Sukarno used the trial as a forum for
analyzing the nationalist struggle, while Sartono and others developed the legal
arguments. On appeal the Jakarta raad van justitie upheld the landraad decision
against the accused, though it was specious in several respects. The trial is
discussed in Bernhard Dahm, Sukarno and the Struggle for Indonesian Independence
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1969), pp. 119-26; and Legge, Sukarno, pp.
109-19.

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 163

During the trial Besar's office supported the staff of Sartono's office.
When Sukarno and three other PNI leaders were convicted and imprisoned,
Sartono took charge of the PNI and organized its successor, the Par-
tindo (Partai Indonesia). Sartono (unlike Iskaq) was not arrested, nor
was he bothered much afterwards, because his royal rank placed him, by
right of privileged forum under the protection of the code of criminal
procedure for Europeans.si Lower-born PNI leaders were subject to
H.I.R., which made arrest, detention, interrogation, and conviction
easier matters.

It is possible, though a guess, that 75 percent of all ethnic In-

donesian advocates were in some way organizationally involved in the
pre-war nationalist movement. The primary beneficiary was the PNI, the
essentially priyayi-led Nationalist party formed in 1927. As most ad-
vocates were from priyayi or analogous non-Javanese backgrounds, this
is not surprising. The alternatives among the major political currents
were Islamic organizations and the Communist party, neither of which--
on grounds of religious orientation and social class--could have much
appeal to those who became lawyers, though there were exceptions in
both cases. But for the advocacy's mainstream the attraction of the
PNI included more than its priyayi roots. It was not simply a priyayi
party, fitting neatly into the historical picture of class structure
and religious conflict in Java. The PNI was also significantly a prod-
uct of the Ethical policy, which produced the beginnings of a new pro-
fessional stratum out of the old priyayi class. The founding members
of the party were typically new urban professionals. Sukarno was a
recently graduated engineer from the technical faculty in Bandung,
though he never really pursued the career. Of eight other leading
founders one more was an engineer (Anwari), two were doctors (Cipto
Mangunkusumo and Samsi Sastrowidagdo), and five were advocates (Iskaq,
Sartono, Budiarto, Ali Sastroamijoyo, and Sunaryo).52 No other politi-
cal party before or after independence had such a concentration of pri-
vate lawyers. Only two other parties in independent Indonesia drew at
all upon the advocacy for leadership. One was the modernist Islamic
party Masyumi, the other the small intellectual-led Socialist party (PSI,
Partai Sosialis Indonesia). In the colony a few lawyers who were advo-
cates then or later--Mohammad Rum, for example--were active in Islamic
organizations in Java and Sumatra. After 1945 they joined Masyumi, as
did some post-1950 advocates. If one shifts perspectives on Indonesian
party politics from religious to class cleavage, the PNI and Masyumi
were the primary representatives of urban middle-class, professional,
and commercial interests, along with much else. Advocates found rea-
sonably comfortable political homes in both. The post-revolutionary
PSI was not devoid of commercial connections and interests by any
means, but among advocates its chief appeal was to those whose secular

51. Sartono, for example, could not have been tried in the landraad but would have had
to be brought before the raad van justitie. As Sartono himself pointed out,pros-
ecuting officials had to be very careful in questioning him, all the more so be-
cause he was an advocate who understood his rights. He was in fact questioned
frequently, but he told his interrogators that he had forgotten everything about
PNI meetings, and there was little they could do short of trying to develop a case
before the raad van justitie (December 4, 1960). The raad van justitie might have
taken a quite different view of the legal issues from the landraad in Bandung.
52. There were other organizers of the party, but I have taken only the names men-
tioned by Kahin in Nationalism and Revolution, p. 90. All the advocates had been
to Leiden together and most had been active in Perhimpunan Indonesia. In a person-
al communication, Benedict Anderson emphasized the point that they were a classmate
clique, which may have been as important as the fact that they were advocates.

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164

intellectual and professional orientations made them uncomfortable with

some of the radical-populist or radical-nationalist overtones of PNI
ideology as well as the religious directions of Islamic parties.53
As most advocates were nationalists of one sort or another, they
were also nationally oriented. Like other new Indonesian profession-
als, they tended to graduate from local attachments and perspectives
to basically national ones. They participated easily in what Hildred
Geertz has called the Indonesian metropolitan superculture.54 In their
professional and political lives they used the languages of the nation-
al elite--Dutch and, increasingly, Indonesian--rather than Javanese,
Sundanese, Batak, Minangkabau, or other regional languages. Even at
home, Dutch was used more often than not. Many, if not most, ethnic
Chinese advocates spoke little or no Chinese; Dutch was their first
language. The professional, political, and personal relationships of
advocates transcended regional, religious, and ethnic affiliations.
Even the antagonism between ethnic Indonesians and ethnic Chinese was
overcome in their work. They seem to have remained no less prejudiced
against one another's groups than the population at large, but profes-
sionally they mixed with ease and still do; a few ethnic Indonesian
and ethnic Chinese advocates organized law offices together and devel-
oped professionally and personally intimate friendships. Advocates
also moved about the country a great deal, for business or pleasure,
and the network of commercial cities across the archipelago was famil-
iar to them. Their private lives were in many ways typically urban
upper middle-class. While many of them still attended and enjoyed
traditional regional arts, they were also theatergoers and partygoers.
They read widely in Dutch and often in German, French, and English.
Seldom did they leave the religious circle of their birth; devout Mus-
lims remained Muslims, nominally Islamic abangan remained basically
contemptuous of Islam and inclined to Javanese mysticism, Christians
remained Christians. But with few exceptions their religious views
tended to be moderate and a bit skeptical, and their religious devo-
tions not very time-consuming.

Oriented to the nation, to nationalism, and to urban life and com-

merce, advocates were also generally oriented to national political,
economic, and social change. So were many others, but with advocates
the objectives were frequently precise and well articulated; or perhaps
they were more institutionally focused than most. In contrast with
locally and patrimonially oriented pamong praja (territorial adminis-
tration) officials, and even with Indonesian judges, advocates tended
to see local institutions, authority, and culture as outmoded barriers
to modernity. There were nationalist leaders, like Sukarno, who saw
something almost romantically appealing in the old traditions, which
were at least Indonesian traditions. Advocates by and large would
have none of this: structure and volksgeist both had to be trans-
formed, gradually, to be sure, but irrevocably. The models of change
they had in mind were informed by European precedents of urban growth,

53. Several advocates, or former advocates, who identified with PSI views were not
actually members of the party, but there is no question that that is where their
sympathies and friends lay. A very few advocates--two or three--were connected
with the Communist party (PKI). One, for example, was R. M. Abdulmajid Joyoadi-
ningrat, from Central Java, who studied in Leiden and was a PI leader. For a
time during the 1930s he was a member of the Dutch Communist party executive
committee.

54. Hildred Geertz, "Indonesian Cultures and Communities," in Ruth T. McVey, Indon
sia (New Haven: Human Relations Area File, 1963), p. 35.

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 165

commercial spirit and expansion, institutional specialization and elab-

oration, and development of a general "rights-consciousness" among the
people--rights understood not in collective but individual terms. All
this constituted the advocate's medium, and it would not be served by
the preservation of local institutions and authority. The old patri-
monialism was largely unacceptable to them because it assumed a uni-
verse of authoritative institutions, procedures, and values that placed
no particular premium on lawyerly skills, and in fact fundamentally
disvalued such skills as constraining and disruptive.

Advocates' views were especially clear with respect to legal in-

stitutions. They were among the first to condemn adat courts, an ex-
plicit symbol of traditional local authority, which private lawyers
had nothing to do with and which contrasted starkly with the formal
urban courts where advocates made their careers. As practicing law-
yers, moreover, who took for granted the value and necessity of rule
consistency, uniformity, and regularity, advocates were understandably
committed to unifying institutions throughout the territory of Indone-
sia, even before the revolutionary mobilization made national unity a
commonplace appeal. After 1945, wherever former advocates were in
positions of authority in the Republic of Indonesia, they actively
worked to abolish old adat institutions and to establish new national
institutions. Early in the revolution, for example, Iskaq Cokrohadi-
suryo, as resident in the Central Javanese area of Banyumas, initiated
the elimination of traditional "free villages" (desa perdikan) that had
been relieved of taxation and labor obligations in exchange for perpet-
ual religious and other services.55 Advocates in Sumatra, some of whom
became republican administrative and judicial officials, took the revo-
lutionary opportunity to get rid of adat courts wherever they still
existed. And Mr. Besar, as secretary-general of the Ministry of Jus-
tice from 1946 to 1959, literally presided over the abolition of adat
courts and the establishment of national courts in most of Indonesia.s6
In no way does this deny the essential conservatism of Indonesian
advocates, like most private lawyers everywhere perhaps, but their con-
servatism was related primarily to the institutional values that had
given them extraordinary status and had become part of the entire pro-
fessional, intellectual, and ideological baggage of the advocacy. In
general the political, social, and economic attitudes of Indonesian
advocates can be characterized as instrumentally conservative but sub-
stantially "progressive," in contrast with the bulk of the civil ser-
vice, which was instrumentally and substantially conservative, and some

55. Undang-undang (Law) no. 13, 1946, in Koesnodiprodjo, ed., Himpunan Undang2,
Peraturan2, Penetapan2, Pemerintah Republik Indonesia (Jakarta: Seno, 1951),
volume for 1946, p. 54. The reason given for abolishing the desa perdikan, of
which there were about two hundred throughout Central and East Java and Madu
was that there needed to be just one kind of village structure in order to de-
velop a strong Indonesia. On the desa perdikan, which were not subject to local
pamong praja control, see C. Snonck Hurgronje, "Vrije Desa's," in Gobbe and
Adriaanse, Ambtelijke Adviezen van C. Snouck Hurgronje 1889-1936 (The Hague:
Nijhoff, 1957), pp. 722ff.; and Sutarjo Kartohadikusumo, Desa (Yogyakarta: n.p.,
1953), pp. 52ff.
56. See my article on "Judicial Unification in Post-Colonial Indonesia," Indonesia,
16 (October 1973), pp. 1-39.

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166

political leaders who were instrumentally and substantially radical or,

in a few cases, instrumentally radical but substantially conservative.
This formula lacks precision, but it will serve our purposes.

Given their prominence in the nationalist movement, advocates

might have been expected to do rather well in the independent state.
On the contrary, however, in Indonesia as in many other former colonies
private lawyers declined both politically and professionally not long
after the transfer of sovereignty. Political and professional deteri-
oration were broadly related through the failure of political and eco-
nomic liberalism, such as it was, in the post-independence era. Here
I will deal with political more briefly than with professional decline,
because the latter returns us to the advocates' origins.

For a time advocates seemed to be very influential in politics.

It had already been mentioned that the parliamentary system was most
agreeable to them. Ethnic Indonesian advocates were so heavily in-
volved then in government and party work that the professional advocacy
itself was somewhat depleted. Sartono was speaker of Parliament, Iskaq
a minister of finance, Ali Sastroamijoyo twice prime minister, Besar
secretary-general of the Ministry of Justice--two of whose ministers,
Lukman Wiriadinata (PSI) and Jody Gondokusumo (PRN, Partai Rakyat
Nasional), were advocates--Sunaryo a foreign minister, and so on.s57
But in general advocates were a very small part of the political elite,
and, what is more important, the political arena itself was not greatly
expanded by the participation of new groups and forces that were little
attracted by the advocates' gradualist and institutionally oriented
conceptions of change. Mr. Besar, Indonesia's first advocate, was
ironically also one of the first to feel the impact of the entry of
new social groups with different political styles and visions. In
October 1945, while Resident of Pekalongan Residency on the northern
coast of Central Java, he was abruptly forced from his position by the
action of local revolutionary youth groups, beginning a wave of popu-
lar insurrections in Pekalongan and adjoining areas.58 Soon thereafter
he joined the republican Ministry of Justice as its permanent secre-
tary-general, a position he held until 1959, but had little to do with
the volatile politics of independence. Other prominent pre-war advo-
cates, some of whom continued to practice when they were not in office,
were politically active, but few, if any, took very well to the mass
politics of the 1950s. In office, like lawyers anywhere, they varied
in character. Some, like Sartono, remained always concerned with such
matters as financial control and institutional probity; others wheeled
and dealed with the best of them. But symbolic leadership rested with
others, who spoke to huge national audiences in the language of popular
mobilization that advocates, by and large, did not master and usually
found distasteful. With the onset of Guided Democracy, advocates lost
whatever institutional and ideological footing that parliamentary ideas
had tentatively provided. The patrimonialism of Guided Democracy could
not accommodate advocates; most of them were in fact liberals of one
kind or another and they would not attach themselves unequivocally to
Sukarno, who ignored them. In the governments of Guided Democracy no
practicing advocate held office, and only two or three of the old

57. Several of these men--Iskaq, Lukman, and Jody, for example--maintained their
private practices and returned to them when out of office. So did Muhammad
and others in and out of Jakarta.

58. See Benedict R. O'G. Anderson, Java in a Time of Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1972), pp. 337ff. for a discussion of the Three Regions
Affair.

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 167

pre-war advocates--Sartono peripherally, Ali Sastroamijoyo as PNI

chairman, and Twa Kusumasumantri--were more or less involved.

The professional decline of advocates after 1950 was in some ways

more complex. Advocates themselves often attributed it to immediate
legal and political causes or, more vaguely, to cultural factors: the
inadequacies of the judicial system, for example, or political leaders'
lack of respect for legal process, or the absence of a rights-conscious
public. While these were all undoubtedly contributing causes, they
shift the perspective away from the advocacy's own peculiar place in
the picture. It was not the courts, or political leaders, or cultural
values that were deviant, but the advocacy itself that was out of phase
with its economic, political, and social environments. For it to have
been otherwise, advocates would have to have made these environments
over--something a few of them have always been aware of and tried to
accomplish--but this, by themselves, they had no power to achieve.

The deeper roots of the advocates' problem are least obscured in

the colonial context of their origins. First of all, in economic terms
ethnic Indonesian advocates were rather anomalous. Unlike Dutch and
eventually ethnic Chinese advocates, they did not emerge out of a well-
developed indigenous economy. Many of them could and did prosper but
on the periphery of an economy controlled by other major ethnic groups.
When the colonial political economy broke down, and political power
moved into Indonesian hands, it was nearly inevitable that the private
economy and its processes would be drastically revised. This could
not be accomplished, however, so long as old legal institutions and
processes maintained anything like their former influence. It was
done informally, partly by way of corruption, and politically, by way
of the takeover and nationalizations of 1957-58, which transformed
much of Dutch corporate into Indonesian state property. Indonesian
advocates were thus denied any of the advantages of economic base and
procedural centrality that Dutch advocates in the colony had once en-
joyed. Ethnic Chinese advocates retained a commercial base of sorts,
but this base did not now require legal services in much more than a
pro forma way.

Second, Indonesian advocates did not develop a firm foothold in

the indigenous economy or society of colonial Indonesia, nor is it
likely that they could have. They were politically involved and often
known as political leaders. They enjoyed high social status, both
from their class origins and from their membership in the educated
elite of the colony. But professionally they had very little to do
with much of Indonesian society. Few people with legal problems or
disputes that ended up in litigation went to private lawyers, whether
Dutch, ethnic Indonesian, or ethnic Chinese. Only a small minority of
well-to-do Indonesians did. For most, however, the urban advocacy was
beyond their reach--financially, socially, and culturally. It was not
that a need did not exist. It did. But long before Indonesian advo-
cates appeared, another institution developed around this need: the
pokrol bambu, or bush-lawyer, who typically managed the legal problems
of villagers and lower-class city-dwellers. Operating in the land-
raden, pokrol bambu needed little or no formal legal education, no
professional recognition, and no besaluit (decree) from the Hooggerechts
hof in order to practice. Occasionally an Indonesian law student made
his way as a pokrol bambu. Mr. Mohammad Rum was one. Usually, pokrol
bambu were neither well-born nor well-educated. What they had, and
most Indonesians did not, was some ability to use Dutch in Dutch-
controlled institutions, some social assertiveness, and some mastery
of the rudiments of procedure. So active were pokrol bambu, especially
in Java, that, soon after Indonesian advocates began to practice, a

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168

group of pokrol bambu organized their own professional association in

1927. In many ways pokrol bambu made a better go of it in independent
Indonesia than trained advocates did.s59
Third, Indonesian advocates were tied institutionally to the Euro-
pean part of the colonial administrative structure. The peculiarity
of their role in Indonesian legal history vastly complicated their
problems of professional adaptation in the independent state. The
advocacy was not a link between modern and traditional legal systems,
and never pretended to be. Pokrol bambu operated more or less as such
a link. Advocates belonged to the most sophisticated and powerful
part of the plural legal system, and had little contact with the rest.
With independence, it was as if the institutional center of gravity,
guided by the impetus of political power, shifted from the European
part of colonial administration towards the Indonesian part, while at
the same time economic and political processes began to change as well.
In the judicial system, for example, it was the landraad, now the
pengadilan negeri, that survived, not the raad van justitie, and it
was the H.I.R., not the rigorous European formal codes, that governed
procedure. Advocates lost purchase throughout, not only in the courts,
but more generally in the economy, for economic process no longer de-
pended upon enforceable legal process. They found themselves trying
to swim in a dwindling supply of water, at least until the late 1960s,
when the New Order's revival of the private economy and foreign invest-
ment, along with its early emphasis on rechtsstaat symbols, spilled
more water into the lake.

In general advocates responded to the change around them by con-

servatively, sometimes rigidly, and often courageously reasserting the
original tenets of their professional role. This does not mean that a
solid phalanx of advocates suicidally refused to have anything to do
with the realities of independent Indonesia. On the contrary, a num-
ber of advocates who kept working, even during the Guided Democracy
period when advocates were least in demand, and who did well finan-
cially, unquestioningly and sometimes unhesitatingly adapted to the
procedural and economic realities of the times. There were also those
who refused to do so, who insisted upon utterly upright professional
behavior, who defended unpopular causes in court, and who made little
money. Most advocates, especially under Guided Democracy, merely sur-
vived, with luck, on a few well-paying cases that offered little pro-
fessional satisfaction, went into semi-retirement, or supplemented
meager professional incomes from family wealth and other jobs. (Al-
most no new advocates entered the profession during the years of Guided
Democracy. The first substantial new cohort of private lawyers in in-
dependent Indonesia began work only in the early New Order period.)
But on the whole, whatever they did in practice, advocates would not--
perhaps could not--relinquish the original conceptions of their func-
tion. Partly because the profession was for years dominated by men
who first became advocates in the colony, there was great reluctance
to recognize or admit any fundamental change in professional style or
responsibilities from those of the colony. Explicit changes in proce-
dure were (often rightly) seen as threats; implicit changes were dis-
missed as necessary but temporary deviations. Nor would advocates give
up the old symbols of their profession, even when these seemed disad-
vantageously bound up with the colonial past or European referents.

59. On the pokrol bambu, see my Bush-Lawyers in Indonesia: Stratification, Represe

tation, and Brokerage (Berkeley: University of California, Center for the Study
of Law and Society, Working Paper no. 1, 1973).

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 169

During the early 1960s, when the Ministry of Justice changed emblems
from the European goddess of justice to the banyan tree, inscribed with
the word pengayoman (shelter), advocates stubbornly refused to join
judges, prosecutors, and others who altered their crests. They held
on to a set of scales underneath crossed swords, inscribed with the
words fiat justitia ruat coelum. Nearly alone among organized groups
of any kind, the advocates' association refused to ask Sukarno's
blessing of its activities; Peradin leaders insisted that theirs was
a private profession in no way beholden to the government.

Judges, prosecutors, notaries, bureaucrats, and other legal func-

tionaries, who also suffered role strain in the independent state,
nevertheless adapted more easily than advocates to new conditions.
For one thing, they at least kept working, while many advocates began
to run out of meaningful work within a few years of the revolution.
Moreover, public lawyers could shift into patrimonial gear when this
seemed appropriate, but advocates had no way of doing so. The speci-
ficity of the private lawyering role, a new one introduced by colonial
rule and derived from European economic and political concepts, tended
to make advocates institutionally conservative, but so did their insti-
tutional circumstances in the independent state. Especially during
the years of Guided Democracy, they remained a small liberal pocket in
a patrimonial camp. Their fate depended upon developments over which,
for better or worse, they had almost no influence.

Yet, to end on a slightly romantic note, the advocacy survived

with a good deal of integrity. By this I do not mean that all advo-
cates were brave, honest, and pure. As elsewhere a majority of advo-
cates pursued their profession in order to make a living, and if their
role as intermediaries called for corrupt procedures, many used them.
But the profession, by surviving, also kept alive some ideals that are
peculiarly attached to the advocacy. They have to do with private
rights, procedural fairness, and protection against government power.
One can argue about the validity and efficacy of the liberal vision
which incorporates these concerns, but there is no point to doing so
here. My point is simply that a small handful of Indonesian advocates,
proportionately probably no more nor less than in other countries, but
often at greater professional and personal cost, have consistently
devoted attention to such issues, and the profession at large has given
them some support.

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