Pranoto Iskandar (McGill University - Centre for Human Rights and Legal Pluralism; The Institute for Migrant Rights) has posted Is There an Indonesian Constitutional Democracy? Welcoming the War on the Tradition of Meaning ((2024) Oxford U Comparative L Forum 2) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
As far as English language scholarship on Indonesian legal studies is concerned, “deep empiricism” has now become Indonesia’s very own Leviathan. In this critical review, I argue that deep empiricism signifies the adoption of a singular understanding of constitutional democracy. As the Indonesian case shows, the translated constitutional democracy signifies a meaning that may not align with the original meaning of the concept. However, the assumption behind deep empiricism is that various questions can be answered without understanding, or at least vigorously clarifying, their conceptual meaning. Furthermore, it not only lacked interest in theorising but, more importantly, its followers never stood outside of legal practice and remained bound up in the law reform project. Worse, it denies the existence of human agency in the context of making sense of Indonesian legal and constitutional behavior. In other words, the commitment to deep empiricism has unwittingly led to the denial of Indonesia’s capacity to establish and evaluate its own desire; that is, making a subjective distinction between what is and is not desirable.