Rule of Law as Comparative Law: Indonesia Revisits Code Reform

Abstract

With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 came an almost euphoric sense in some academic quarters that the field of comparative law would now come into its own. The legal reforms prescribed for transition economies by the international financial institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) would have the effect of pulling them into a globalised economic system. This would require some degree of harmonization with current �best practice� or international standards, particularly in the areas of commercial law, civil procedure, and the design of courts in which the newly-minted laws could be used by business. By the early 1990s it seemed very much that we were on the cusp of a fin de si�cle wave of law-making on a grand scale that might rival the codification movement of the late nineteenth century. Those expectations were further underscored with the advent of the 1997�1998 Asian Financial Crisis.