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Article contents
From Thin to Thick Justice and Beyond: Access to Justice and Legal Pluralism in Indigenous Taiwan
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 December 2021
Abstract
In recent decades, the Taiwan judiciary has taken steps toward securing Indigenous people’s access to the justice system. These measures reflect a vision of access to justice framed narrowly on national courts and legal actors through the provision of free legal counsel, courtroom interpreters, and special court units dedicated to Indigenous people. These measures embrace a thin understanding of access to justice that overlooks important hurdles to both seeking and providing such access to Indigenous people. This article considers some of the key challenges of Indigenous people’s access to justice in Taiwan and the role of the judiciary in both perpetuating and addressing those challenges. It argues for a thicker understanding of access to justice that addresses the circumstances of contemporary Indigenous life and confronts the entrenchment of colonialism in the state framework. Field research in eastern Taiwan shows how aspects of normativity, spatiality, economics, order, language, and institutions, ensconced in a legal framework that reinforces an unequal power relationship between the state and Indigenous people, have shaped the character of access to the justice system and, in turn, continue to operate as obstacles to meaningful access to justice for Taiwan’s Indigenous people.
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- © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Bar Foundation
Footnotes
The research for this article was funded by fellowships from the National Science Foundation, J. William Fulbright Scholarship Board, Taiwan Fellowship, and Native American and Indigenous Studies Fellowship, as well as travel grants from Indiana University. The opportunity to work through issues that would be clarified in the writing of this article was provided by the Max Planck Institute Dissertation Writing-Up Fellowship in Law and Anthropology. The research design of this article was approved by the Human Subjects/Institutional Review Board at Indiana University (Protocol no. 1607741261).
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