A Long Century of Taiwan's Westernized Justice System: Historicizing the Dynamics of Her Judicial Reform of 1999

Abstract

This draft is to become a chapter of the book project Judicial Reform in Taiwan: Institutionalising Democracy and the Diffusion of Law (Neil Chisholm ed., Routledge, forthcoming). The project bears on Taiwan's judicial reform of 1999. It is the first book-length study of Taiwan's judiciary and its transformation in the early stage of Taiwan's democratization. Written after a second judicial reform that was launched in 2017, this chapter aims at historicizing not only Taiwan's judiciary but also the attempts to reform it. This chapter provides in its first part a historical account of Taiwan's justice system and the society's perception of it in the long century between 1895 to 1999. Rejecting the conventional narratives which enumerate origins of legal reception, this part explains how the justice system under Japanese rule (1895--1945) has earned respect despite the colonialism, and why this system fell into disarray under the Republican Chinese occupation (1945--92). This chapter argues then in its second part that Taiwan's reformers have reduced the poor quality of the country's administration of justice to the malfunction of the judiciary alone. Taking into account the history of Western judiciary itself, this chapter argues that the key reform issues pertain rather to state-building than the making of organizational and procedural laws. This chapter argues that the centralization of government lawyering in a broad sense is Taiwan's priority and expects that this issue would soon lead to more reform attempts.