The Political Question Doctrine in Taiwan: A Critical Analysis of Taiwan's Judicial Review and Judicial Yuan Interpretation No.328 [1993]

Master's Thesis from the year 2012 in the subject Law - Comparative Legal Systems, Comparative Law, grade: Super Distinction, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, language: English, abstract: This thesis studies Judicial Yuan Interpretation No.328 [1993] - the first constitutional court decision specifically relating to the use of the political question doctrine in Taiwan. Taiwan's constitutional court, on the whole, does not refuse to involve itself in political questions, but this case represented an opportunity for the Justices of the Republic of China (Taiwan) to introduce the political question doctrine into Taiwan's legal system. The Judicial Yuan's previous and subsequent judicial reviews included cases in which the constitutional court dismissed the authoritarian congress for democratisation or struck down an unconstitutional constitutional amendment. It is therefore doubtful that the Justices would claim to be unable to determine the political question in Judicial Yuan Interpretation No.328 [1993]. The court had by then become too powerful to persuade people that it should address the political question doctrine. The Justices applied the political question doctrine in this case only because they wished to avoid becoming mired in political controversy.

David KC Huang has been a visiting fellow in constitutional law at the O.P. Jindal Global Law School in Delhi, India since 2018. He is a Taiwanese scholar specializing in constitutional law, administrative law, judicial politics and behaviorism, philosophy, sinology and mathematics. He received fundamental legal education in both civil law (Taiwan) and common law (England and Wales) jurisdictions, by which he can compare civil law jurisprudence with that of common law in detail. He also majored in philosophy and can read any classical Chinese literature within the past four millennia without a dictionary. He obtained his Ph.D. degree in constitutional law at SOAS Law School, University of London, with a thesis about Taiwan's judicial supremacy through strategic decision-making in the 1990s.