About | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline

36 UCLA Pac. Basin L.J. 33 (2019)
The Currency Exchanger: Taiwanese Public Interest Lawyers in the 21st Century

handle is hein.journals/uclapblj36 and id is 38 raw text is: 





         THE CURRENCY EXCHANGER:
 TAIWANESE PUBLIC INTEREST LAWYERS
                IN  THE 21ST CENTURY


                      Ching-Fang Hsu*+



                            ABSTRACT
     The  rights discourse has become a common   and powerful cur-
rency in the public sphere. Public interest lawyers, who reason in law and
facilitate the movements of legal rights, are the currency exchanger that
converts power and political momentum, symbolic and formal, between
different public entities. This paper adopts a relational framework to
understand the presence of public interest lawyers in Taiwan and the
complexity of their involvement in promoting, defending, or mobilizing
for public good. I systematically analyze the bidirectional relationships
that lawyers develop with government (both the administration and the
parliament), political party, civil society (including NGOs and the gen-
eral public), and the court. By examining two types of operation, lawyers
in organizations and lawyers in mobilizations, I use the development of
four NGOs  and four social movements in Taiwan-gender, environment,
labor, and China watch-to  argue that the expertise of exchange leads
to the prevalent role that public interest lawyers are able to play in the
twenty-first century.

                       TABLE  OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION: PUBLIC INTEREST LAWYER AS THE CURRENCY EXCHANGER ...34
I.   STANDING BETWEEN  LAW  AND POLITICS: LAWYERS IN
     ORGANIZATIONS                 .....................................................36
     A.  Judicial Reform (1997-Today) .........................36


     *  Ching-Fang Hsu is a doctorate candidate in political science at the Univer-
sity of Toronto. She received her LL.B from National Taiwan University, LL.M from
UC Berkeley, and M.A. from the University of Chicago. Trained as a lawyer and social
scientist, she works in the interdisciplinary area between political science and law, fo-
cusing on the politics of judicial institutions and legal actors in various power settings.
Her work has been published by the Asian Journal of Law and Society and University
of Pennsylvania East Asia Law Review.
   +    A full version of this article will be published in Lawyers and Access to Jus-
tice as edited by Professor Helena Whalen-Bridge.

    @ 2018 Ching-Fang Hsu. All rights reserved.
                               33

What Is HeinOnline?

HeinOnline is a subscription-based resource containing thousands of academic and legal journals from inception; complete coverage of government documents such as U.S. Statutes at Large, U.S. Code, Federal Register, Code of Federal Regulations, U.S. Reports, and much more. Documents are image-based, fully searchable PDFs with the authority of print combined with the accessibility of a user-friendly and powerful database. For more information, request a quote or trial for your organization below.



Short-term subscription options include 24 hours, 48 hours, or 1 week to HeinOnline.

Contact us for annual subscription options:

Already a HeinOnline Subscriber?

profiles profiles most