About the Journal

Indonesian Effectiveness of Law is a scholarly journal examining how law operates in society and the extent to which it achieves its objectives, provides protection, and delivers justice. The journal focuses on two principal contexts: artificial societies and maritime societies.

Artificial societies encompass social life and interactions that are formed or mediated by digital technologies, such as online platforms, virtual communities, artificial intelligence, and other digital systems. Maritime societies include coastal and island communities, as well as communities whose lives are closely connected to the sea, including fishers, customary law communities, and other groups that depend on marine resources and maritime spaces.

The journal views legal effectiveness as an issue that must be examined in context. The existence of legal rules does not, by itself, demonstrate that law operates effectively. Their implementation may be influenced by the substance of the law; law enforcement institutions and officials; facilities and infrastructure; social conditions and legal knowledge; and legal culture. These factors may interact, carry different weight, or fail to fully explain a particular issue in a given context.

Accordingly, frameworks used in the study of legal effectiveness are treated as starting points for analysis, not as a closed list or checklist to be applied uniformly. The journal encourages authors to examine the relevance of existing factors, identify their limitations, and—where supported by sound reasoning and evidence—propose new factors, combine or distinguish existing ones, or refine the analytical framework. In this way, contributions to the journal are expected to advance conceptual understandings of legal effectiveness.

Indonesian Effectiveness of Law welcomes research articles, conceptual studies, case analyses, and policy studies using doctrinal, empirical, comparative, or interdisciplinary approaches. Submissions may examine legal effectiveness in artificial or maritime societies, or connect both contexts. In every case, however, the operation of law must remain central to the analysis; papers that discuss technology, digital life, the sea, or coastal communities in general without a clear legal analysis fall outside the journal’s focus.

The journal aims to provide a forum for critical, evidence-based research that remains open to theoretical development. It encourages studies that ask not only whether law is effective, but also how that effectiveness is produced, for whom law works or fails, and how frameworks for understanding legal effectiveness can continue to evolve.