Sebastiaan Pompe's meticulous account of the collapse of the Indonesian Supreme Court is a welcome corrective to a judgment still heard that Suharto's New Order government provided economic progress at relatively low societal cost. The problems began before the New Order in 1966, but the wounds from the Suharto regime went deep into the Supreme Court and the courts below it. When Suharto fell and Reformasi began in 1998, the court lagged far behind the vanguard working for change, and one purpose of the author is to explain why. He begins with the late colonial period and assembles a rich variety of evidence to track the changes up to the beginning of 2004. Along the way, he explains much else, combining historical and political insights with occasional in-depth analyses of legal doctrine. But readers need not be interested in his careful explication of the cassation mechanism (for determining which lower...

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