Paper short abstract:

This paper is at aimed to challenge women’s access to justice in inheritance disputes and inheritance law as it is applied by the Indonesian religious court as well as the district court. This research examines further how inheritance issues are settled as trouble-less cases out of court. How women are projected in Islamic inheritance law and its application in the daily life of the society

Paper long abstract:

This paper is at aimed to challenge the position of women in inheritance law and its practice. There are complicated multilayers of legal pluralism concerning Indonesian inheritance law, as legal pluralism is not only deal with the co-existence of more than one legal order, but each existing legal system, no matter state law, adat law, or Islamic law contains its own legal pluralism. Inheritance issues will also be a lens through which we can see the contestation and negotiation of religio-politics as reflected in disputes about jurisdiction of court institutions since 1937 under Dutch administration to the present time.

There are two conceptual as well as practical problem which become the grounds of this research. Firstly, it challenges women's access to justice in inheritance disputes and inheritance law as it is applied by the religious court as well as the district court. To explain this formulated problem, 169 cases were gathered from the Supreme Court which settled from 2000 to 2009, and will be analyzed in quantitative perspective.

Second, this research concerns how inheritance issues are settled as trouble-less cases out of court. It is analysed on how women are projected in (Islamic) inheritance law and its application in the daily life in the society. In this part, we can see how inheritance affairs affect the women's perception of inheritance law and perhaps affect their life too. This part of the research will review women's experiences in trouble-less inheritance cases through field work conducted in West Java (Cianjur and Depok).