Pengaturan Kewajiban Hakim “Menggali Nilai Yang Hidup dalam Masyarakat”: Tinjauan Historis dari UU No. 14 Tahun 1970 Hingga UU No. 48 Tahun 2009

Irwansyah Irwansyah (Universitas Al-Azhar)

Jurnal Hukum, Politik dan Ilmu Sosial (JHPIS)
Vol. 3 No. 2 (2024): Juni: JURNAL HUKUM, POLITIK DAN ILMU SOSIAL

The statutory duty of Indonesian judges to explore, follow, and understand legal values and the sense of justice living in society has persisted across major reforms of judicial power, yet its changing normative meaning has received limited diachronic analysis. This study examines the evolution of that duty from Law No. 14 of 1970 to Law No. 48 of 2009 and clarifies its relationship with living law, judicial independence, legal certainty, and substantive justice. Using normative legal research, the study applies statutory, historical, and conceptual approaches to primary legislation and recent legal scholarship. The analysis compares statutory formulations, explanatory texts, institutional contexts, and interpretive consequences across four regulatory phases. The findings show strong normative continuity in the verbs “explore, follow, and understand,” alongside a substantive shift from recognition of unwritten law in a transitional legal order toward a broader, constitutionally accountable model of judicial interpretation. The 2009 formulation also explicitly extends the obligation to constitutional judges. The study argues that living law should function as a reasoned interpretive resource rather than an autonomous basis for judicial discretion, requiring transparent justification consistent with the Constitution, human rights, legal certainty, and judicial independence.