The Application of Humanization, Liberation, and Transcendence in Indonesian Courts

Sutiyoso, Bambang

Prophetic Law Review
Vol. 8 No. 2 December 2026

Indonesian judicial law combines commitments to legality, justice, responsiveness to living legal values, and reasoned decision-making. A persistent challenge, however, lies in translating these commitments into the adjudication of hard cases without allowing substantive justice to develop into unconstrained judicial discretion. This study develops a prophetic approach to judicial reasoning through normative legal research, drawing on statutory, conceptual, prophetic-jurisprudential, and case-law approaches. It identifies an operational normative gap between Indonesia’s justice-oriented judicial mandates and the methodological tools available for incorporating human dignity, structural injustice, and ethical responsibility into judicial reasoning. To address this gap, the study proposes the Prophetic Judicial Reasoning Framework (PJRF), which integrates legal identification, interpretation, judicial discretion, balancing, and reasoned justification within three interrelated prophetic dimensions. Humanization requires judicial reasoning to protect human dignity, substantive equality, and the concrete interests of persons affected by legal decisions. Liberation directs judges to identify and respond to structural injustice, domination, discrimination, and unequal power relations while remaining anchored in legally permissible reasoning. Transcendence provides an ethical orientation that connects judicial authority with moral responsibility, integrity, and accountability beyond merely formal compliance with positive law. These prophetic dimensions operate as evaluative criteria throughout the reasoning process, while legal anchoring, reason-giving, proportionality, consistency, and reviewability function as institutional safeguards against arbitrary discretion. The PJRF therefore contributes to prophetic-law scholarship by shifting its analytical focus from retrospective evaluations of judicial outcomes to a structured methodology that helps judges justify legally available choices in a manner that is simultaneously juridical, humane, emancipatory, and ethically accountable.