This concluding chapter reflects on the contributions in this volume in light of Dan S. Lev’s work on legal evolution and political change. Munger highlights Lev’s admirable lifetime of academic-activism on Indonesian law. It is this mix of academic scholarship and practical advocacy that informs the chapters in this volume and orients the chapters towards Lev’s work as an example of scholarship infused with activism.

The court system in Indonesia has changed and expanded rapidly since 1998, with the introduction of a wide range of specialised courts. These come in a variety of forms, from independent specialised courts to ones that exist within the general court system, each with different forms of specialised jurisdiction and often a mix of non-career and career judges. These specialised courts often seek to disrupt existing concerns with the general court system in an attempt to circumvent the cycles of corruption. I consider the extent to which Lev’s work can help us understand this phenomenon. Lev’s empirical approach to the study of Indonesian law remains critical to ensure a deep view of courts. Further Lev’s work demonstrates the importance of legal culture as a means to study the politics of courts, while remaining conscious of the need to avoid ‘grand myths’ in favour of the empirically obvious. Lev’s work leaves a significant and intellectually formidable legacy for the study of legal culture and Indonesian courts. The chapters that follow in this volume consider the judicial innovation and specialisation that has occurred across the court sector in Indonesia. They also point to persistent features of judicial practice, such as the pervasiveness of corruption, that resonate with Lev’s assessment of the state of the courts.

In this chapter, I will reflect on Lev’s analysis of the political dimensions of Indonesia’s Islamic courts system. As a postscript in his last chapter of his book Islamic courts in Indonesia, Lev looks into the question of what consequences of political developments in 1971 might have for the future of the Islamic courts. According to Lev, a dual legal system consisting of ‘civil and religious legal systems reflect competing political principles and sources of legitimacy that cannot be tolerated for long’. Lev predicted in 1971 that the civil legal system in ‘one form or another’ would attempt to subjugate Islamic institutions to overriding principles of state legitimacy and bureaucratic integrity, but that the result of this process would be uncertain and dependent on the development of the religious–social–political cleavage in Indonesia. Below I will argue that a convergence between the civil and religious legal systems took place after 1971, but that this was not the result of subjugation of religious law by the civil legal system, but of an increased fusion of the civil and the religious pillars within Indonesia’s religious, social, political and legal domains.

This chapter draws on Daniel S. Lev’s work on Indonesian law and legal culture to assess the Constitutional Court’s role in the reformasi. One of the central themes running though Lev’s work, the chapter notes, was the idea that law’s claim to authority as an autonomous body of norms is invariably a function of politics – of the middle class’s need to promote this quintessentially liberal idea of law to further its own interests. On the other hand, Lev also recognised that societies generally prosper where there is public confidence in precisely this conception of law. This tension in Lev’s work may be resolved, the chapter argues, if law’s autonomy from politics is seen as being, not an empirically provable fact, but a constitutional-cultural ideology that may take hold under certain conditions. The third section uses this modified Levian conceptual framework to examine the Indonesian Constitutional Court’s role in promoting the rule of law after the constitutional reforms of 1999–2002. While the Court has made admirable strides, the chapter argues, its vacillation between a legalist and an instrumentalist conception of law has inhibited the consolidation of a stable societal understanding of its legitimate role in tempering the exercise of political power. The chapter conclusions on this score, despite differences of conceptualisation, demonstrate how vitally important Lev’s work still is to the fate of the Indonesian ‘law-state’.