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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

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