The Beginning of Law and The Adat Recht

The beginning of law and the adat recht
As far we know, the law began with the family, the father was the head of family, and the orders he gave, the rules of conduct by him,were the law As family expanded and the members went out on their own, the family group became known as a clan, subject to the rule of the man who was selected to head it. Eventually, clans in the same area joined forces and become members of a tribe. They chose a chief to head this larger grouop. The chief of the tribe made a rules or law to govern the dealings of one clan with another, but head of the clan still made the laws for the family group. If a tribal law was broken, the chief decided the guilt or innocence of the person accused and fixed the punishment. The head of clan judge and determined the punishment for those who broke the rules within his family group. Those clan and tribal laws were not written down for countless centuries we dont know how many, but they were handed down by word of mouth from one generation to another. Some of them are actually still in force today. For example, a man who was a member of one clan could not marry a woman from the same clan, he head to choose his bride from another clan of the same tribe. In ancient times , there were few property right was considered that god owned all the landand that members of any tribe who settled on the land could use it. Farming, hunting ang finishing were the main ways of making a living then, and the tribes moved around a great deal. After a tract of land had been worked for a few generation, the tribe went on to look for richer soil and settled somewhere else. Wars of subjugation were avoided whenever possible. When a tribe moved, the laws of the old land became the laws of the new land. These laws were changed or new laws were made only as the wanderes found new customs in new areas or as the traits of the people changed. Still, the laws were handed down by word of the mouth and not written down because people hhad not yet invented writing, even on stone tablets. In Indonesia, laws of the land date back to the dutch colonial rule. It was the dutch who introduced European laws to the country, then known as the Netherlands east indies. As early as 1824, there was concept of separate law made by the dutch government. The population was then divided into three groups as far as laws concerned, namely : Europeans, natives and foreign orientals . Netherlands living in the indies were subject to the laws Europeans the indigenous inhabitants were subject to the law of natives, where as the foreign Asians were not subject to either of the above. They were subject to a separate ordinance. During the dutch colonial rule, the laws for the natives were primarily the adat laws. Snouck hurgronye, the dutch Indonesian-arabic scholar and statesman of the nineteenth century, first pointed out that, since custamory practices among most the people of the archipelago were dominated by the Arabic word adat, or costum , adat also had legal connotation so, adat became adatrecht in dutch or adat law in English.
Many historians stated that the traits or costum of the people were the basis of adat law. Though deeply rooted in traditional culture, adat is an embodiment of the traditional values and moral as well as an expression of universal values. Today adat law still regulates such aspects of life as marriage, birth, death, inheritance, And divorce. When speaking of origin of laws of Indonesia, one must go back to the period when the Indonesian archipelago was under dutch colonil rule. The dutch bought with them European system of the government and other aspect of life, and European law was one of them. As has been previously mentioned, they were separate laws in the country under the colonial government in 1826. Different groups of people were subject to different laws. However, by 1848,there was a start to wards codification of the law for the population along eorupean lines by enacting a police and procedur code of natives and foreign orientals of java and Madura in 1848. And criminal code of natives in 1872. Thus even beginning from the dutch colonial rule, the nature of law to be applied to each group of the different group of people living in the country was one of the most difficult police problem in the neherlands east indies.. Another factor which is of great significance in the study of origin of law in Indonesia is existence of the different ethnic groups in the country. The various ethnic groups have different cultural backgrounds, values and custom with regard to many aspects of communal life. For instance,, concerning marriage, the minangkabau folloe the matrilineal system, while the batak adopt the patrilineal system. In the batak clan system, members of the clan should assistone onother in marriage ceremoniaes, and a certain type of hierarchy in the marriage organization, such as who should be the speaker, is decided by costum. The bilateral is common to moost of the regions of Indonesia, including java and Madura, east Sumatra, riau, aceh, etc.

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