Law as Integrity in Pancasila System: Judges’ Reasoning for Hard Cases and Grey Areas

Abstract

Not all legal issues can be resolved solely based on written rules through judicial practice. The development of society is an inevitability, making legal issues increasingly complex and often resulting in gray areas, where sometimes a legal norm does not provide an explicit answer to resolve a case. Ideally, a judge's decision should not only be "based" on written rules in a textual manner, but it should also represent aspects of justice and moral coherence within the legal system. However, the Indonesian legal system, which tends to be legal-formal in style, implies that principle-based reasoning has not been fully utilized when facing ambiguous norms, leading to decisions that may lack the necessary moral and ethical considerations that are essential for justice. Indeed, various studies have discussed the concepts of "hard cases and law as integrity" proposed by Ronald Dworkin, but previous research has not attempted to examine their relevance to systems characterized by civil law, let alone to connect them with the Indonesian legal system based on Pancasila. The method used in this research is normative juridical with a conceptual and doctrinal approach. From the study that has been conducted, this research finds that principled reasoning can be used as a framework for judges' reasoning by making the values of Pancasila the moral foundation in legal interpretation. This integration then gives rise to the "Pancasila-Based Hercules Judge" model, which is a model of judicial reasoning that emphasizes norm analysis, identification of legal ambiguities, and the construction of coherent legal justifications. The gray area of law in this context becomes a space for principled and just legal reasoning.