Law and Politics of Constitutional Courts, Indonesia and the Search for Judicial Heroes, by Stefanus Hendrianto

The birth of the Indonesian Constitutional Court reads like a joke.Law makers and politicians in the legislative branch did not have any intention of creating a court capable of exercising a robust model of judicial review.Their initial intention was to supervise presidential impeachment.However, they realized that they had to endow the court with more authority than that.The joke continued when the court opened on August 19, 2003.It had no funding, no office, and no support staff.The judicial leadership of Jimly Asshiddiqie has changed this situation, as we can read in the book currently under review.As he stated, the court was equipped with only three pieces of paper: the Constitution, the Constitutional Court Law, and the presidential decree that appointed the Constitutional Court justices (p.64) Hendrianto's book is a critical assessment of judicial leadership, examines its impact on the development of Indonesia's constitutional court.Its illuminates the efforts of the first-generation "judicial heroes" of the Indonesian Constitutional Court and critically examines what happened after the Chief Justice Jimly Asshiddiqie left the office.It consists of nine chapters, divided into four parts.Part one focuses on the foundations, explaining theories of judicial heroes.The four chapters of part two discuss the court's first generation, especially the leadership of Jimly Asshidiqie and Mahfud MD.Three chapters in part three described its second generation, which is described as less heroic.Part four is the book's conclusion.Begun as the author's PhD thesis at the University of Washington, the book aims to answer two main questions.What is the impact of chief justices on the development of judicial authority?How can we evaluate different models of judicial leadership in the Indonesian Constitutional Court?Quoting John Gava ( 2001), the book refers to heroic judges as people who "boldly discover rights, refuse to be bound by out-of-date precedents and replace strict rules with flexible standards based on their notions of reasonableness, fairness, and efficiency".Based on various experiences of judicial leadership at constitutional courts, Hendrianto theorizes that a judicial hero achieves such a status through a courageous and ambitious interpretation of the constitution, participating in economic, social, and political governance.A judicial hero has to save society from social wrongs by discovering rights in the law and challenging the status quo (p.15).The book then examined the judges of Indonesia Constitutional Court since its very beginning.Its founding chief justice, Jimly Asshiddiqie, is argued to

Constitution · Constitutional court · Court of record · Impeachment · Joke · Judicial activism · Judicial Independence · Judicial review · Law of the case · Legislature · Original jurisdiction · Political science · Politics · Presidential system · Supreme court · Asian Studies and History · Indonesian Election Politics and Participation · Law · Legal Studies and Policies · Philosophy

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