Volume 4, Number 9
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Legal Dialogue, Chinese Style

Legal scholars in China generally refrain from criticizing official policies in public. Qin (Sky) Ma writes that scholars’ response to the feared shutdown of the China Judgments Online (中国裁判文书网) at the end of 2023 was a noteworthy deviation from the norm. It showed that the space for critical discourse, though constrained, is not entirely closed and that strategic engagement by scholars can have impact. 

Volume 4, Number 8
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Feminization of Poverty and Women's Leadership

Poverty is often the face of a woman. Rangita de Silva de Alwis, a member of the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, hopes that this year’s meeting of the UN Commission on the Status of Women will help make women the face of anti-poverty solutions.

Volume 3, Number 24
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The Holding Foreign Companies Accountable Act: ...

Tamar Groswald Ozery argues that risks to investors may actually be worsened by US enforcement of the Holding Foreign Companies Accountable Act, which was enacted in the name of investor protection. Ozery describes the HFCA as part of a geopolitical agenda of decoupling, but says it is backfiring by enhancing the Chinese government’s control over Chinese issuers.

Volume 3, Number 20
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The High Price of Lying in US-China Relations

Following the recent Chinese balloon incident, both Washington and Beijing would do well to recall lessons from a failed CIA espionage mission in China 70 years ago, says Jerome A. Cohen. US refusal to acknowledge the CIA’s role resulted in its own agent, John T. Downey, spending almost 21 years in a Chinese prison. The most obvious lesson: how counterproductive it is for governments to engage in lying.

Volume 3, Number 19
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The Future of CEDAW

Rangita de Silva de Alwis, who joined the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women in January 2023, shares her vision for future development of the jurisprudence of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women.

Taiwan

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The Cost of Government Deadlock: Taiwan’s Zombie Institutions

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The deep partisan divisions rending Taiwan's government are no secret. Legislative push-back to President Lai Ching-te’s budgets has received international attention. Yinn-Ching Lu writes that much less attention has been paid both abroad and within Taiwan to a different manifestation of the power struggle between the branches: near-paralysis of the government appointment process. Critical institutions’ leadership ranks are being decapitated by the legislature’s refusal to approve presidential nominees, a phenomenon that Lu says may ultimately be more damaging to Taiwan’s democracy.

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Taiwan's Existential Choice: Dialogue or Arms

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The chairwoman of Taiwan’s Nationalist (Kuomintang) Party, Cheng Li-wun, has a message for Americans: Taiwan should not be the next Ukraine. Rather, Taiwan should reconcile with China and seek to carve out some kind of autonomy within “the great Chinese nation.” Katherine Wilhelm writes that most of Taiwan’s 23 million people do not identify as Chinese, but they are deeply divided over whether the best way to preserve their way of life is befriending China or arming against China.

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A Civil Society-Based Approach to Online Misinformation: The Experience of Taiwan

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Taiwan’s recent general elections were accompanied by extensive attacks of online misinformation designed to confuse and disrupt the process. Authors Wen-Chen Chang and Yu-teng Lin argue that Taiwan’s response to these attacks embodies “civic constitutionalism” in action, with civil society organizations taking the lead to identify and correct the misinformation while the government played a supporting role.

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Taiwan’s Citizen Judges Act: Part II

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Lay adjudication can give citizens a meaningful role in the administration of justice and may boost their confidence in the courts. However, the use of lay adjudication also may raise questions about the extent to which systems can deliver a fair trial and the safeguards needed to assure accused persons that the system of adjudication is independent and impartial.

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Taiwan’s Citizen Judges Act: Part I

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In 2020, after years of advocacy by judicial reformers, Taiwan’s legislature passed the Citizen Judges Act, providing for professional judges to share their benches - and their power - with lay judges in a relatively small subset of criminal cases. The law takes effect January 2023. USALI Perspectives invited six experts in Taiwan’s judicial system to unpack the practical challenges and potential larger significance of this seemingly small step.

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Exonerating Those They Prosecuted: Prosecutorial Reforms in China, the US, and Taiwan

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Traditionally, prosecutors have focused on putting criminals in jail. That narrow focus is now broadening to some extent on both sides of the Pacific as prosecutors in China, Taiwan, and the United States give significant attention to redressing wrongful convictions. The following is a brief comparison of reform efforts in those three jurisdictions.