Challenges to Constitutional Courts in Korea and Taiwan
Date: Tuesday, February 4, 2025
Time: 7:30-8:30 pm (Eastern)
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About the event:
The Constitutional Courts of South Korea and Taiwan have been thrust into the spotlight in recent weeks as they are asked to arbitrate bitter power struggles between the elected branches – power struggles in which the justices themselves have been targeted. In Korea, the Constitutional Court is hearing arguments over whether to ratify the legislature’s impeachment of President Yoon Suk Yeol. But until impeaching Yoon, the opposition party that controls the legislature was refusing to fill vacancies on the court. In Taiwan, the party that controls the legislature has blocked the president’s nominees to the Constitutional Court because it regards the court as politicized, while also passing legislation that immobilizes the court unless vacancies are filled. Two eminent constitutional scholars – Chaihark Hahm of Yonsei Law School and Jiunn-rong Yeh of National Taiwan University – will explain the background to the current crises and reflect on the role of courts in protecting democracy at times of deep partisan divisions.
About the speakers:
Chaihark Hahm is a professor of law at Yonsei Law School. His research has focused on comparative constitutional law, democratic political theory, Confucian philosophy, and Korean legal culture and history. His works in English have appeared in the Journal of Democracy, American Journal of Comparative Law, and I•CON: International Journal of Constitutional Law, among others. He is author of The Constitution of South Korea: A Contextual Analysis (Hart, 2024) and co-author of Making We the People: Democratic Constitutional Founding in Postwar Japan and South Korea (Cambridge University Press, 2015). He holds law degrees from Seoul National University, Yale Law School, Columbia Law School, and Harvard Law School, as well as a master’s degree from Yale Divinity School.
Jiunn-rong Yeh is the National Taiwan University Chair Professor at the College of Law of National Taiwan University in Taipei. He writes and teaches about constitutional law including comparative constitutional law, environmental policy, and administrative law. Between 2002 and 2018, Professor Yeh served as minister without portfolio (in charge of inter-ministerial coordination), minister of the Research, Development and Evaluation Commission (overseeing government functions in the Cabinet), member and secretary-general of the National Assembly, minister of the interior, and minister of education. He is author of The Constitution of Taiwan: A Contextual Analysis (Hart, 2016) and co-editor of Asian Courts in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2015).