Instructions:

1. Read and translate the reading passage below!

2. Make a summary of the reading passage below!

CHAPTER I
THE BEGINNING OF LAW

THE BEGINNING OF LAW

1. As far as we know, the law began with the family. The father was the head of the
family, and the orders he gave, the rules of conduct made by him, were the law.
2. As families expanded and the members went out on their own, the family group
became known as a clan, subject to the rule of the man who was selected to head it.
Eventually , clans in the same area joined forces and became members of a tribe.
They chose a chief to head this larger group.

• The chief of the tribe made rules or laws to govern the dealings of one clan with
another, but the head of the clan still made the laws for the family group. If a tribal
law was broken, the chief decided the guilt or innocence of the person accused and
fixed the punishment . The head of a clan judged and determined the punishment
for those who broke the rules within his family group.

1. Those clan and tribal laws were not written down for countless centuries, we don’t
know how many, but they were handed down by word of mouth from one
generation to another. Some of them are actually still in force For example, a man
who was a member of one clan could not marry a woman from the same clan; he had
to choose his bride from another clan of the same tribe.
2. In ancient times, there were few property rights (hak). It was considered
(dianggap) that God owned all the land and that the members of any tribe who
settled on the land could use it. Farming, hunting (berburu) and fishing were the
main ways of making a living then, and the tribes moved around a great After a
tract of land had been worked for a few generation the tribe went on to look for
(mencari)richer soil and settled some where else. Wars of subjugation were
avoided (dihindari) whenever possible.
3. When a tribe moved, the laws of the old land became the laws of the new land. These
laws were changed or new laws were made only as the wanderers found new
customs in new areas or as the traits of the people changed. Still, the laws were

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 handed down by word of mouth and not written down because people had not yet
invented writing, even on stone tablets.

In Indonesia, laws of the land date back to the Dutch colonial rule. It was the Dutch
who introduced European laws to the country, then known as the Netherlands East Indies.
As early as 1824, there was a concept of separate law made by the Dutch government. The
population was then divided into three groups as far as law were concerned, namely :
Europeans, natives and foreign orientals.netherlanders living in the Indies were subject to
the laws for Europeans: the indigenous inhabitants were subject to the laws for natives,
whereas (sedangkan) the foreign Asians were not subject to either of the above.

They were subject to a separate ordinance.

During the Dutch colonial rule, the laws for the natives were primarily the adat
laws,Snouck Hurgronye, the Dutch Indonesian-Arabic scholar and statesman of the
nineteenth century, first pointed out (menjelaskan) that, since customary practices
(kebiasaan) among most of the peoples of the archipelago were dominated
(dipengaruhi) by the Arabic word adat, or custom, adat also had legal connotations, so,
adat became ‘ adatrecht’ in Dutch or ‘ adat law’ in English.
Many historians (ahli sejarah) stated that the traits or customs of the people were
the basis of adat law. Though deeply rooted in traditional culture, adat is an embodiment
of the traditional values (nilai) and morals as well as an expression of universal values.
Today adat law still regulates (mengatur) such aspects of life as marriage (perkawinan),
birth (kelahiran) , death(kematian), inheritance (warisan), and divorce (perceraian)
When speaking of the origin of laws in Indonesia, one must go back to the period
when the Indonesian archipelago was under Dutch Colonial rule. The Dutch brought with
them the European system of government and others aspects of life, and European law was
one of them. As has been previously mentioned (disebutkan) there were separate laws in
the country under the colonial government in 1826. Different groups of people were
subject to different laws. However, by 1848, there was a start towards codification of the
law for the population along European lines by enacting (pengesahan) a Police and
Procedure Code for Natives and Foreign Orientals of Java and Madura in 1848, and Criminal
Code for Natives in 1872. Thus (maka), even beginning from the Dutch Colonial rule, the
nature of the law to be applied (yang digunakan) to each group of the different groups of
people living in the country was one of the most difficult policy problems in the
Netherlands East Indies.

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