Borobudur Law and Society Journal

Land acquisition for the public interest rests on the State’s Right of Control and on the social function of land rights, with deliberation (musyawarah) as the means of balancing public need and private property. The Job Creation Law amended Law No 2 of 2012 so that the compensation value set by the Appraiser is final and binding and serves only as the basis for deciding the form of compensation. This article asks how that amendment has changed the meaning of deliberation and what legal politics it expresses. It is normative legal research using statutory, conceptual and historical approaches, tracing the rules from Presidential Decree No 55 of 1993 through Law No 2 of 2012 and its implementing regulations to the Job Creation regime, and reading them through Mahfud MD’s theory of legal politics, Radbruch’s values of law and Rawls’s procedural justice. Deliberation has been reduced from negotiation over form and amount to a choice of the form of payment, while the unamended provisions on objection to the district court leave the amount contestable only through litigation. The change reflects an elitist and centralistic legal politics that ranks project speed and investment certainty above the bargaining position of owners. The article recommends treating the appraisal as a binding floor rather than a fixed price, through legislative amendment or constitutional review.