This book examines Taiwan’s judicial reform process, which began three years after the 1996 transition to democracy, in 1999, when Taiwanese legal and political leaders began discussing how to reform Taiwan’s judicial system to meet the needs of the new social and political conditions. Covering different areas of the law in a comprehensive way, the book considers, for each legal area, problems related to rights and democracy in that field, the debates over reform, how foreign systems inspired reform proposals, the political process of change, and the substantive legal changes that ultimately emerged. The book also sets Taiwan’s legal reforms in their historical and comparative context, and discusses how the reform process continues to evolve.
This research examines the criminal intellectual property (IP) judicial reforms of Taiwan under the U.S. Special 301 framework. These reforms targeted the sole intermediate appellate court specializing in IP, the Intellectual Property Court (IPC). Following twenty years of judicial reforms trying to raise criminal punishment against IP infringers, Taiwan finally established the IPC in 2008 and transferred jurisdiction over appellate criminal IP cases to it. Due in part to these twenty years of reforms, the United States lifted its long-term Special 301 oversight from Taiwan in 2009, and named Taiwan as a successful model of fighting IP piracy. In spite of U.S. efforts, Taiwan's judiciary continued to follow existing sentencing patterns. This resistance to change appears to be due to the creation of a judicial culture surrounding the sentencing of criminal IP defendants and gradually increasing judicial independence in general. Because the institutional context within which judges sentence criminal IP defendants remained largely unchanged after the reforms, the reforms had little impact. Long-term conflicts between the reforms resulting from U.S. pressure and the local context of judicial practice were the reality behind what the United States claimed was a successful model of IP law reform to reduce piracy in Taiwan. The termination of the U.S. oversight in 2009 provides an opportunity to explore this so-called successful model. This research answers the following questions with respect to the conflicts: What is the U.S. Special 301 framework which shaped Taiwan's judicial reforms toward a punishment regime for IP protection? What are the contexts of Taiwan's judicial independence and judicial culture that protected and reinforced judges' existing sentencing patterns? How, and why, did the judiciary resist the pressure of judicial reforms toward a harsher punishment regime for IP infringement? This research outlines the legal framework within which the United States imposed pressure on Taiwan to reform its IP laws, evolution of Taiwan's IP laws during the period of intense U.S. pressure, and analysis of statistical data and individual cases with respect to judges' sentencing patterns before and after the establishment of the IPC. Based on these analyses, this research finds: (1) the rise of judicial independence following Taiwan's democratization blunted the impact of judicial reforms in the IP criminal sanctions area; (2) the long-term development of a local judicial culture reinforced the sentencing patterns favoring lenient sentences in the area of criminal IP law; and (3) in spite of the 2008 judicial reforms aiming to raise criminal punishment for IP protection there is no evidence to support the idea that judges changed their existing sentencing patterns and became harsher. In light of these findings, it appears that Taiwan cannot be held up as an example of success for the U.S. anti-piracy policy based on harsher criminal sanctions. In Taiwan, domestic judges' lenient sentences for IP infringements were unchanged by the judicial reforms under the U.S. Special 301 framework because growing judicial independence weakened the impact of the judicial reforms and within the judiciary local judicial culture reinforced the existing sentencing patterns.
Taiwan’s modern legal system--quite different from those of both traditional China and the People’s Republic--has evolved since the advent of Japanese rule in 1895. Japan has gradually adopted Western law during the 19th-century and when it occupied Taiwan--a frontier society composed of Han Chinese settlers--its codes were instituted for the purpose of rapidly assimilating the Taiwanese people into Japanese society. Tay-sheng Wang’s comprehensive study lays a solid foundation for future analyses of Taiwanese law. It documents how Western traditions influenced the formation of Taiwan’s modern legal structure through the conduit of Japanese colonial rule and demonstrates the extent to which legal concepts diverged from the Chinese legal tradition and moved toward Western law.
In 2018, it can be said that Taiwan's judicial reform has been raging and a year of contending.In order to help promote flexible justice, the first e-book published for the Taiwanese judicial community - Judicial Spring and Autumn - sees the characters, and it is of great significance to publish on the world's largest online platform AMAZON.
The global expansion of judicial powers makes no exception to Asia. Most noticeable is the judicial expansion in tandem with unprecedented political and legal reforms that have occurred in the two Asian new democracies – Taiwan and South Korea. Having shared a great deal of similarities in colonial legacy, economic development and global competition, both Taiwan and South Korea became good examples of fast-growing economies with successful democratic transitions. In the context of transition, Courts in Taiwan and Korea are expected to independently resolve disputes to place checks and balances with political powers and safeguard individual rights and freedoms. This book looks into court's function in constitutional, regulatory, civil, commercial, and criminal matters by making Taiwan and Korea in comparison.
With a special place among the world's important trading countries, Taiwan presents the international practitioner with its own particular legal issues and problems. Among the world's most many-sourced legal systems, the law of Taiwan sustains major elements from Chinese and Japanese sources as well as its own indigenous and traditional rules and strong influences from both civil and common law traditions. This convenient guide, written by a scholar-practitioner who is both Dean of Law at the National Taiwan University and a panelist in the World Trade Organization's Dispute Settlement Body, is an ideal introduction and practical handbook for anyone involved in a transaction that raises issues in Taiwanese law. After detailed summaries of Taiwan's system of government, its court system, sources of law, and administrative law and procedure, the author covers practice and procedure in such fields of legal activity as the following: contracts; torts; consumer protection; property rights; family law; law of succession; alternative dispute resolution; intellectual property law; trade; government procurement; labor law; and criminal law and procedure. International lawyers will find all the legal situations most likely to arise in the course of transactions connected to Taiwan covered expertly and knowledgeably in this very useful book. It is also valuable to students and scholars for its special insights into issues of comparative law.
