Consensus and suspicion: Judicial reasoning and social change in an Indonesian society 1960-1994

I draw on the archives from two Indonesian courts to analyze how judges hav e reached decisions in the face of conflicting legal norms. Judges in the t own of Takengen, in the highlands of Aceh province; hear claims based on Is lam and on local social norms (adat). Between 1960 and the mid-1990s, they changed the way they resolved disputes over inheritance cases, from accepti ng village settlements as valid, to rejecting those settlements as either c ontrary to Islam or as coercive. I examine the justifications offered in th e earlier and the later periods for these decisions. I find that in. both p eriods judges employed creative legal devices to resolve or bridge differen ces between Islam and adat, and that they consistently referred to broader cultural values of agreement and fairness. I suggest that the change in the ir decisions was due to the combination of political centralization, increa sed legitimacy of the Islamic court, and judges' perceptions of a more indi vidualized society.