Besar Mertokusumo
advocate
Besar Mertokusumo (also spelled Besar Martokusumo; 8 July 1894 – c. 1980) was an Indonesian advocate, said by Daniel S. Lev to be the first.
Early life and education
Mertokusumo was born in Brebes, Central Java, Dutch East Indies on 8 July 1894 to a prosecutor and his wife; he was the first of two children.
He attended elementary school at a Europeesche Lagere School in Pekalongan, graduating in 1909. He then attended the Rechtschool in Batavia, which he graduated in 1915; there, he lived with numerous other Indonesian students under the supervision of a Dutchwoman, studying criminal law. After several years as the Official Seconded (Dutch: Ambtenaar Ter Beschikking) at the Landraad (state court) in Pekalongan, he received a grant to go to Leiden, Netherlands, to study at Leiden University together with eleven others. He graduated in 1922.
Legal and political career
After being refused equal legal status with the Dutch, Mertokusumo decided to become an advocate. He later established a law firm in Tegal, not far from his family in Brebes; at the time, there were few Dutch lawyers there. Despite a lack of support from his family, after a few years he was able to open a second branch in Semarang, attracting young lawyers to his firm with wages up to 600 gulden a month.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4896187. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1894, 1980, 1909 and 1915.
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This entry incorporates text from “Besar Mertokusumo” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.