This book review observes that Taiwan's justice system was influenced by the Warren Court:....In East Asia, the pattern was somewhat different. Thomas Ginsburg, an associate professor of law and director of the Program in Asian Law, Politics, and Society at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, chose three places (Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan) as case studies. These cases suggest that in East Asia, the Warren Court's rulings in the area of criminal procedure, and especially the rulings formulating the exclusionary rule (_Mapp v. Ohio_[1961]) and finding the right to counsel for criminal defendants (_Gideon v. Wainright_ [1963]) in state courts, have had the biggest impact. Other landmark Warren Court rulings, such as _Brown v. Board of Education_ (1954) and _Baker v. Carr_ (1962), have had much more limited influence there, Ginsburg finds.
[Taiwan]
3 comments:
That's interesting. Taiwan, like Korea and Japan, is a civil code jurisdiction based on German law received through Japan. My understanding is that it has become more of a hybrid as ideas from US corporate and finance law have been somewhat uneasily grafted onto the civil code system. But my impression has always been that core areas of the law like criminal procedure have been pretty impervious to common law concepts for the very good reason that German law has worked these problems out very well.
No disrespect to scholar Ginsberg, but he is a dingbat, at least vis-a-vis his view on the Warren Court and Taiwan. There is no direct link that I am aware of. The implication, at least from the two seconds I spent on the review, is that Taiwanese criminal law reformers looked specifically to holdings of the Warren court and modeled themselves on it...wrong. The "reformers" have a kind of mushy half wit idea of what American criminal procedure is and then they modeled the changes (not "reforms", simply changes) on that.
These scholars should really read my witty, "on the ground" (oh I used a journalist cliche!) comments in my various law reform pieces for the American Journal of Chinese (Taiwanese) Studies, then they would not stumble about in darkness.
take care,
Brian
The Anti-Law Reform Committee of San Chung
Thanks Brian, I was hoping you would comment!
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