ALSA 2025 meeting

This panel aims to bridge the traditional socio-legal studies of the "living law" and the recent research of legal consciousness from 4 countries papers.
The concept of "living law," by Eugen Ehrlich, expressed the sense of justice among the ordinary people resisting the denial of their customary practice by state law. Relying on this concept, socio-legal surveys were conducted in various countries to defend customary rights, leading to landmark judicial decisions.
Living law's theory presupposed that such law existed prior to state law, was autonomous and robust, and that the law's community adhering to it was homogeneous. However, our empirical research reveals that in order for longstanding daily practices to be formulated as customary rights, they are often framed using legal categories derived from international human rights norms, state law, or regional legal frameworks. It becomes necessary, therefore, to understand living law as a form of translation of exogenous laws.
Moreover, the way in which such exogenous laws are translated and interpreted varies among local peoples and their supporters. Recent studies on legal consciousness, initiated by Patricia Ewick and Susan Silbey, emphasize the diversity in people’s understanding of law. They focus on how individuals justify and narrate their practices, thereby seeking to capture the plurality of legal consciousness. Relying on this perspective, this panel analyzes the processes through which exogenous law, customary rights, and daily practices are translated and interpreted.
Our topics include customary forests in Japan and Indonesia, farmland reallocation practices in China, and human rights advocacy in Myanmar.

In Indonesia, approximately in the last ten years, a movement acknowledging customary forests and recognising indigenous peoples' right to territory has emerged. This movement was organised after constitutional court decision No. 35/2012, which gave the chance for indigenous people to get their own rights, particularly in their own territories. Currently, on 30th December 2016, peoples of nine customary forests have acquired state acknowledgement of their land rights by the Indonesian president. This momentum marks Indonesia’s first ever recognition of the rights of people who call their forests home. However, for such recognition of forest rights, the national law requires that the regional government first needs to recognize the communities as customary people with the regional product of law to adopt their adat (customary) law system intact. This processes intense inefficiency in order legal procedures and budget to publish the customary law as the formalization to state law. Approximately 461 the regional product of law spread in Indonesia provinces and regencies. In formal regulation, there are eleven (11) ways to gain access to natural resources that are derived from regional legal products recognizing indigenous communities, 10 of which require the existence of regional legal products to access the natural resource objects. This presentation analyzes the product of law in regional level about the indigenous people as discourse, rationales, and legal consciousness for indigenous people’s struggle in the customary forest movement, in order to answer the question why and how the adat people struggle with this formalization, why they mobilize the struggle to achieve the desired recognition as indigenous people/adat community into the Indonesian legal system.