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n issue about rule of law in Indonesia, which I learned about during my internship at a legalaid institute, triggered my curiosity about the vicious cycle of law education and legal practitioners, namely judges.

Since Indonesia is a big country, there are hundreds of law schools in the country. The quality of those schools varies, sometimes greatly. There are some high-quality law schools where high-quality students study a high-quality curriculum with high-quality lecturers.

While on the other hand, there are some low-quality law schools where students (both high quality and low quality) use a low-quality curriculum and lack good lecturers.

Most of the time, those qualified graduates from qualified law school refuse to be judges or state attorneys, which are important legal jobs, because they are low-paid jobs and of course really not privileged jobs. They prefer to work in a law firm because they’ll get “wet”.

So who’ll fulfill the position of judge and state attorney in the country? They must be graduates from those low-quality law schools. What are the implications? The quality of judges and state attorneys is very low, and so are the decisions they make.

What’s the implication of a bad decision in court? The implication is indeed very dangerous because then people won’t get justice as they are supposed to. And because of the low-paid salaries they get, judges and state attorney are more likely to be bribed. See? Justice is completely problematic around here.

I have two solutions to solve this. First, there should be even quality distribution among law schools in Indonesia. I would say that law education is almost as important as medical education, because medical education deals in life and death, and law education deals with people’s right, which also includes life and death.

But people tend to mistake law education as the same as other social sciences. I’m not saying that other sciences are less important, it would be harmful for me too, to take international relations. But, I say that if we want to fix the rule of law and/or law enforcement in Indonesia, then law education should be both widely spread and the quality should be evenly distributed so as to spread knowledge about law evenly over the country.

On the second level, I would like to target the law institution with a two-layer proposal. On the first layer, there should be an increase of salaries or other incentives for judges and state attorneys to motivate high-quality law graduates to fulfill judge or state attorney position.

On the second layer, offer more education and workshops for current judges and state attorneys to boost their skills and indeed, understanding of how important their jobs are and how any mistake they make in their job cannot be tolerated at all.

Talking about rule of law is a complex and complicated matter. Clearly doing these three things won’t be enough. But these might be small steps that could prove very important if implemented well. So maybe the government will consider this.

Priliantina Bebasari
Jakarta