From 23-24 August 2019, the University of Indonesia Law Faculty will host the second Socio-legal Conference. This is in cooperation with Leiden University, KITLV, University of Melbourne, UNSW, University of Sydney and Nagoya University.
The theme of the conference is ‘Towards procedural and substantive justice’. The operation of law in a plural society is complex, in particular when social divides run deep in terms of ethnicity, religion, social status, wealth, knowledge and technology. Legal plurality and social inequalities have influenced the many legal reform programs that have been implemented during the past 50 years and prevented them from achieving their intended results. Most of these programs moreover focused on procedural rather than substantive justice reform – departing from the assumption that legal institutional development, improving the quality of legislation and enhancing access to justice will automatically generate legal social justice. However, this assumption is hard to sustain in the face of the continuing gap between procedural and substantive justice in the many fields that directly affect the daily lives of millions of Indonesians, such as natural resource management, labor, family, etc. The Conference in 2019 will look at such fields with the aim of mapping and explaining the problems in achieving substantive justice and of trying to find a way out of them.
Melissa Crouch 