by: I MADE PAWITRA W.A.P & AGUS WINAHYO
Introduction: The Jatayu parable
In the classic Hindu epic, Jatayu is the noble vulture-king who intercepts the multi-headed demon-king Ravana to rescue the abducted Sita, fighting valiantly until his wings are clipped and he falls to the earth. In the contemporary political landscape of 21st-century Indonesia, this narrative serves as a poignant metaphor for the republic itself. Once soaring on the idealistic wings of independence, the nation’s foundational philosophies are increasingly used not as living principles of justice, but as a formal facade for systemic, oligarchic extraction. Over the last twenty-five years, procedural democracy—defined by hyper-technical compliance, bureaucratic expansion, and transactional politics—has steadily displaced actual human progress.
This crisis of governance is fundamentally an intellectual one, rooted in a legal education system that prioritizes rigid legal positivism over systemic ethics. However, this challenge is not unique to Indonesia; it mirrors a global disillusionment among Gen-Z youth who witness democratic backsliding and institutional capture worldwide. To counter this decay, a new intellectual movement is required: one that moves away from sterile, imported frameworks and instead embraces a “vernacular jurisprudence”. By anchoring legal philosophy in local, culturally resonant moral frameworks, young scholars can rebuild the structural integrity of the law. This essay argues that reclaiming the true promise of a nation requires turning away from detached technocracy and toward a value-driven, community-centered legal paradigm.
The Global Technocratic Trap: The Architecture of “Las Ketok” Law
The historical transitions of the late 20th century promised a global triumph of the rule of law. In Indonesia, the 1998 Reformasi promised to dismantle systemic corruption. Yet, across many developing democracies, the reality has been a transition from centralized authoritarianism to decentralized, hyper-efficient oligarchies. Under this setup, the formal markers of democracy—elections, constitutional courts, and dense regulatory codes—are maintained precisely to give a veneer of legitimacy to predatory behavior.
This systemic decay is enabled by an intellectual surrender within legal academia, where students are trained in a dogmatic brand of legal positivism. This approach treats law merely as lex—the written, officially stamped text recorded in a state gazette—demanding absolute obedience to the letter of the law regardless of its moral outcome. This transforms legal practitioners into what Indonesian roadside culture calls a bengkel las ketok (a panel beater shop).
A las ketok mechanic takes a dented, broken piece of metal and brutally hammers it into a desired shape through sheer force. Crucially, the work is cosmetic; it beats the surface into place so the vehicle looks pristine from the outside while ignoring the structural rot underneath. This is how mechanical legal positivism operates globally. It uses flawless formal procedures and compliance checklists to make extractive, corporate-friendly laws look valid on paper, providing intellectual cover for severe systemic injustice. For Gen-Z worldwide, this manifests as a system that is legally compliant but structurally unlivable.
The Semantic Error and the Idol of Value-Free Legal Science
To understand how legal education lost its moral compass, one must examine a profound epistemological error: the insistence on treating the study of law as a value-free, empirical science. In the Indonesian academic context, this stems from a linguistic limitation where a single catch-all term, “Ilmu”, is used to translate three distinct Western concepts: Kunde (study), Wetenschap (empirical science), and Geleerdheid (scholarship).
By forcing law into the restrictive mold of a Westernized wetenschap (legal science), universities demanded that it behave like a natural or social science—universally applicable, numbers-driven, and entirely decoupled from morality. This forced objectivity strips law of its unique, intrinsic nature. Law is not merely an analytical discipline designed to observe the world as it is (das Sein); it is inherently a prescriptive and moral discipline designed to articulate what ought to be done (das Sollen) to resolve human suffering and uphold fairness.
When academia worships the berhala regulasi (the idol of regulation) through a cold, technocratic lens, it detaches itself from the community. Generations of scholars have spent their careers importing abstract, external legal frameworks—whether neo-Kantian constitutional designs or Western liberal paradigms—and attempting to hammer local landscapes into those foreign molds. Because these theories are often sterile and blind to local cultural realities, ruling elites quickly learn how to exploit them, using the mechanics of “legal science” to legitimize systemic exploitation.
The Illusion of Choice and Constitutional Disobedience
The consequences of this mechanical approach to law are starkly visible in contemporary governance, particularly in the commercialization of elections and the corporate capture of legislatures. Globally, modern electoral democracy is often praised as a triumph of progress, yet it frequently degenerates into what can be described as judi koprok—a street-level gambling dice game where the dice are completely loaded. Through money politics, media manipulation, and algorithmic echo chambers, political syndicates ensure that the house always wins, leaving citizens with a false binary choice within a rigged market.
When such systems seat corporate proxies in parliament, the resulting legislative output directly undermines the public good. A prime example is Indonesia’s controversial Omnibus Law on Job Creation (UU Cipta Kerja). Originally forming the accidental and highly symbolic acronym RUU CILAKA (meaning misfortune or disaster in the native tongue), the law was engineered to prioritize mega-capitalism by dismantling labor protections, bypassing environmental assessments (Amdal), and overriding the customary land rights (hak ulayat) of indigenous communities.
Furthermore, when judicial institutions attempt to intervene—as when the Constitutional Court declared the law conditionally unconstitutional—the establishment frequently resorts to calculated constitutional disobedience. By bypassing the highest courts through emergency executive regulations (Perpu) that are later rubber-stamped by a complicit legislature, the ruling elite signals that political and financial interests stand above constitutional boundaries. Backed by their technocratic legal advisors, they maintain that because the procedure was recorded, it is valid—demanding absolute obedience to the formal corpse of the constitution while destroying its soul.
