Living the Law: Tenants’ Lived Experiences of Legal Obligation under Unfair Rental Agreements in Urban Indonesia
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Abstract
Civil law governs contractual relationships, yet little is understood about how individuals subjectively experience legal obligations under unfair agreements. In urban rental contexts, tenants often face imbalanced contracts that shape not only their rights but their lived realities. Existing research has largely overlooked the emotional, moral, and interpretive dimensions of such legal obligations, prompting the question: how do tenants perceive and make meaning of their legal responsibilities under unjust rental agreements?
This study adopts an interpretative phenomenological approach to uncover the lived experiences of tenants confronting contractual inequality.
Conducted in three major Indonesian cities between January and June 2024, this research involved in-depth interviews with ten urban tenants selected through purposive sampling.
Using thematic analysis informed by interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA), this study reveals four key themes: legal powerlessness, silent compliance, informal negotiation, and normalization of injustice. Participants internalized legal obligations not as neutral duties but as emotionally charged experiences influenced by fear, dependency, and cultural norms. The findings demonstrate that tenants negotiate legal meaning beyond the text of the contract, shaped by personal and social vulnerability.
These results challenge the assumption of objectivity in civil obligations and call for a more human-centered understanding of law as lived experience.
In addition to contributing to socio-legal scholarship on legal consciousness, this study offers practical recommendations for policy reform, including clearer enforcement of rental contract fairness, legal literacy programs for tenants, and culturally responsive tenant protection mechanisms.
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