The Voice of the Law in Transition: Indonesian Jurists and Their Languages, 1915-2000

In the literature on Indonesian legal history, the role of language has been paid scant attention. Even the replacement of Dutch by Indonesian as the official language of the law, surely a major event for the work of Indonesian jurists, has not been closely examined. Yet, since the early 1970s, legal usage and terminology have been the topic of a steady stream of highly critical publications by linguists and, remarkably, by jurists as well. Their criticism is focused on the heterogeneity of...