The legal complex fractured: Legal professional coalition and collision in Taiwan's judicial reform

Abstract

AbstractSociolegal studies have identified a collectivity of legal actors—the legal complex—and its association with political liberalism in varying power settings. However, little attention has been paid to how such a collectivity evolves with regime change, or if and when such a collectivity might dissolve. Studying the case of Taiwan, this article demonstrates how various legal professions—lawyers, judges, and prosecutors—unite and divide during and after state transition. Democratization had an unsettling effect that brought out the internal dynamics of the legal professions, which initially aligned with one another to defend judicial autonomy from authoritarian control, but then confronted one another in judicial policy making during democratic times. Each legal profession bases its policy orientations on a normative commitment, which leads to three lines of confrontation: the ways in which the judiciary is held accountable, the extent to which the procuracy enjoys investigative power, and the institutional division between the judiciary and procuracy.