Haar, Barend Ter (1892–1941)

Barend ter Haar, a Dutch jurist, was one of the most prominent members of the adat law movement. He authored one of the few English works on adat law, an innovative, in-depth research study of customary law in the former Netherlands East Indies, now Indonesia.

Ter Haar studied law in Leiden and in 1915 wrote a dissertation on the procedural aspects of adat law, supervised by Cornelis van Vollenhoven (1874–1933). In 1924, after serving for a few years as a judge, ter Haar accepted a chair in adat law at the newly founded Law College of Batavia. Here, he actively conducted and supervised empirical research on indigenous customs and advocated for the recognition of these customs in the colonial legal system.

A three-volume Dutch collection of his works, the Verzamelde Geschriften (1950), demonstrates the range of ter Haar's interests, from religious law and land law to the customary law of procedure and the Western influence on adat law. Part of this work, published in English in 1948, was entitled Adat Law in Indonesia. The book provided, in the tradition of the Adat School, an introduction to the sociopolitical context of indigenous customs and a thematic overview of topics such as land law, the law of persons, and tort (delict) law in the nineteen legal circles distinguished in the archipelago.

The book also introduced some of ter Haar's theoretical concerns, such as the importance of using indigenous terminology to describe customary systems, and set out his definition of law as a function of the decision doctrine: Only through affirmation by judicial decision makers, whether judges or village heads, do unwritten norms become law. In this view, the effectiveness of these decisions depends on how closely they correspond to a community's structural ties, values, and social evolution.

In contrast to van Vollenhoven, ter Haar conceptualized adat law as a positivist legal science. Legal enforcement of successive similar decisions would gradually lead to the progressive codification of adat law. This, he argued, set it apart from the nascent discipline of legal ethnology. However, his theory of progressive codification of adat law was discarded after World War II. Raden Supomo (1903–1958), one of his former pupils and his biographer, became the first minister of justice in independent Indonesia, where he stressed legal unification. After 1998, there was renewed interest in adat law in Indonesia in the context of legal decentralization, especially in the area of land law.