Adatrecht, the standard treatise of C. van Vollenhoven on the indigenous customary law of the Netherlands Indies, was the principal theoretical authority cited by D. W. N. de Boer in Het recht op den grond in Atjeh (1931), and the work against whose account of the Atjehnese beschikkingsrecht De Boer set his own findings.
Passages cited for Atjeh
De Boer referred to the work by page throughout his study:
- p. 164 — on the wathe (Malay hasil) revenues, import and export duties and other adat incomes of the oeleebalang, cited alongside De Atjehers Vol. I, p. 122.
- pp. 190, 200 — on the absence in Atjeh of any requirement that a clearer of waste land be a member of the village community, in contrast with other adat regions.
- p. 196 — the statement that “een verbleekt of slapend beschikkingsrecht bestaat hier niet,” and the characterisation of the Atjehnese grazing usage as “het eigenaardige recht” possibly surviving from a village right of avail.
- pp. 197 ff. — the extended description of the Inlandsch bezitsrecht, the indigenous right of possession ranking immediately below the right of avail, to which De Boer referred the reader rather than repeating the material.
- p. 198 — the enumeration of the restrictions upon that right of possession, and the position that no adat-lawful rule entitled the oeleebalang to annex the lands of persons dying without heirs.
- p. 202 — the neighbour’s right of preference on a sale of land, cited with De Atjehers Vol. I, p. 106.
De Boer’s corrections
De Boer disputed the page-196 judgement for the zelfbesturende landschappen, holding that there the beschikkingsrecht (right of avail over unappropriated land) was neither faded nor asleep; and he denied that the grazing usage was a “right” at all, treating it instead as a bare economic convenience of no juridical character, and reasserting that the gampong had no role in Atjehnese rights in land.
Significance
Adatrecht provided the vocabulary — beschikkingsrecht, Inlandsch bezitsrecht (indigenous right of possession), grondenrecht — in which Atjehnese land law was described and compared with the customary law of Toba, Minangkabau and Java. The corrections entered against it by practitioners such as De Boer form part of the record of how the general scheme was tested against regional judicial practice.
See Also
- C. van Vollenhoven
- Beschikkingsrecht in Atjeh
- Milik
- Het recht op den grond in Atjeh (De Boer)
- De Atjehers (Snouck Hurgronje)
- Adat
Source
Het recht op den grond in Atjeh, by D. W. N. de Boer, dated Scheveningen, November 1931, pp. 59-80. Offprint DLP-141, Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, ‘s-Gravenhage; Bibliotheek KITLV accession 0060 4460 60 081470 428.