Internship Reflection | Is Discovering the Truth Harder, or Communicating It?

I think the discovery of truth and the communication of truth are always intertwined in legal work, and my internship at the JRF was no different. Two ideas from jurisprudence especially fascinated me. One concerns the limits of human knowledge: philosophers tell us that human beings can encounter only the reality of the sensory world, while the sensory world is merely an imperfect copy of the world of ideas, so we can never reach reality itself. The other concerns the meaning of truth: a claim to truth must remain open to examination and be capable of surviving repeated testing.

At the JRF, I watched different departments pull against one another, disagree, communicate, and persuade as they moved between discovering truth and communicating it. Legal practice seems similar. Through collecting evidence, argument by both sides, examination and cross-examination, and adversarial testing, we move step by step toward the facts of a case. We then use the legal knowledge and methods learned in school to express our conclusions in judgments and communicate to society the truth as we understand it.

"Do you think discovering the truth is harder, or communicating it?" Attorney Ming-Ju asked during an intern group-supervision session. Most people chose "communicating the truth." I later ran a poll on my Instagram story: 84 percent chose communication and only 16 percent discovery. I interned in the JRF's Advocacy Department, a unit focused heavily on communicating truth, and my immediate answer was the same. Advocacy resembles the translation and education work I hope to do in the future: we try to present difficult legal controversies and case issues in accessible, concise language, using analogies drawn from ordinary life and adapting the form to social-media and media platforms in the hope of attracting public attention.

Our advocacy project focused on the Chen Ching-Kai case. Throughout the process, I kept stumbling back and forth between discovering truth and communicating it-contradicting myself, struggling, revising, and then moving a little farther forward. I first encountered the case through materials organized on the JRF website. I was somewhat dismissive, thinking I was seeing only "filtered truth," and after browsing a few pages I went straight to the Judicial Yuan website to read the judgments myself. The judgments left me conflicted. Part of me was relieved that perhaps the judges were not quite as "terrible" as I had imagined; another part struggled to understand why the defendant had made certain choices at the time. At that stage I was trying to sort through realities conveyed by other people and move closer to the truth for myself. After several meetings, reviewing more evidence, and listening to my supervisor explain the issues, I began trying to communicate "the truth I believed." I wrote, deleted, and rewrote, looking for analogies from ordinary life that could make difficult forensic experiments understandable. When I finally looked at the result, I was startled: it was not very different from the materials already on the JRF website-the same carefully condensed work produced by the senior colleagues whose efforts I had initially dismissed.

I felt like the student in a physics problem who travels ten kilometers but ends with a displacement of zero. Yet I really had stumbled all the way from trying to discover the truth to the finish line of trying to communicate it. The experience repeatedly brought me back to the problem of epistemic limits that I had encountered in jurisprudence: the assumption that human beings can never fully reach reality. As legal professionals, we can never completely enter into the love, resentment, entanglements, hesitation, or misunderstanding between the parties-what happened, what did not happen, and what people truly meant. That is precisely why we must remember the presumption of innocence that we repeatedly write in textbooks and exam answers. We should approach truth with the humility of a blank page and move carefully toward it. And when communicating what we believe to be true, we should retain gentleness and empathy, resist using knowledge as a weapon of self-defense, remember that judgments can shape society, and recognize that truth must remain open to testing-as must legal professionals themselves.

Most importantly, there are always human beings standing in the shadows behind the truth. Legal work ultimately asks us to understand, address, and communicate problems between people-not Plaintiff A, Defendant B, and bona fide third party C. In law school I often felt myself growing more numb each year. An exam begins; students spot an issue and almost light up, unloading doctrinal debates they have forced into memory: "In conclusion, View B is preferable; therefore, Plaintiff A's claim is unfounded." The bell rings, pens go down, papers are collected. But I cannot see-and may not care at all-what Plaintiff A has lived through, or why that person was occupying someone else's home without a legal right to do so.

The Chen Ching-Kai Case | Visual Impairment Is Not What You Think (YouTube)

At the JRF, Wang Wu and Chang San step out of the exam paper. They breathe, cry, and show helplessness. On an exam they may be the "heinous criminals" in the hypothetical; in front of us they may be an honest older person scratching his head while awkwardly finding a way to show concern for you, or a young person in pain over having to give up a dream of competing on the national team.

My criminal-procedure professor once shared a line from the Bible in class: "Law makes nothing perfect." I think that may be the greatest lesson of my JRF internship. On the journey of approaching and communicating truth, law alone perfects nothing; there are always people. The real questions are how, as human beings, we approach truth, how we understand the limits of ourselves and of law, and how we choose words to communicate one human-centered reality after another.