NCJ Number
92393
Journal
Law and Society Volume: 15 Issue: 2 Dated: (1980-81) Pages: 347-368
Date Published
1981
Length
22 pages
Annotation
This study of the relationship between businessmen and the civil courts in the Indonesian province of North Sumatra finds that Sumatran businessmen seldom use the courts either to collect retail debts or to settle commercial disputes among themselves.
Abstract
In fact, they were found to litigate disputes only when they hoped to salvage something from a failing business relationship, or when simply opening litigation could by itself help discharge a bureaucratic responsibility, satisfy a personal grudge, or harass a defendant into making an out-of-court settlement. The unusual cost structure of the civil courts, relatively low formal costs and relatively high informal costs, contributed to an unfavorable image of the courts as expensive, arbitrary, and inefficient dispute settlement mechanisms in the eyes of one important group of businessmen, the rubber exporters. Other characteristics of the exporters, their trading partners, and the social and economic relationships among them were found, however, to present more basic obstacles to the use of the courts in settling commercial disputes. These results then suggest some general conditions under which the capacity of a legal system to influence the development of commercial relations is severely limited. (Publisher abstract)