Sidelights | Between the State and the People: The Past, Present, and Future of Legal Aid and Judicial Reform

I. Introduction

(Moderator / Chen Hai-yuan, former Chairman of the JRF)

Twenty-two years ago, the JRF and many organizations established the Three Major Judicial Reform Bills Promotion Alliance, within which the Legal Aid Act made the most rapid progress.

Less than a month after the alliance was formed, its internal committee resolved to visit Legislative Yuan President Wang Jin-pyng to advocate for funding. Then-Premier Yu Shyi-kun also pledged during their meeting to allocate NT$ 1 billion to establish the Legal Aid Foundation, which was subsequently founded on June 1, 2004.

Over the past 20 years, the Legal Aid Foundation has grown from humble and difficult beginnings to prosperity. Today, Taiwan has 22 branch offices, dozens of full-time attorneys, 300 staff members, and an annual total budget reaching NT$ 1.5 billion. Professor Chen Hai-yuan handed the hosting duties over to the speakers to recount the fascinating stories behind this journey.

II. The Past of Legal Aid: Looking Back on the Path Traveled

(Speaker / Wu Chih-kuang, former Board Director of the Legal Aid Foundation)

Board Director Wu Chih-kuang opened with the remark that "the origins of many systems stem from both coincidence and necessity," recounting the background of the establishment of legal aid.

1. Turning Regrets into Seeds to Let Legal Aid Take Root and Sprout

Taiwan's first television legal drama, *LA Law*, led many Taiwanese citizens to mistakenly believe that Taiwan also had juries and the Miranda rights—especially the final sentence of the Miranda rights: "If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed for you by the government."

During Director Wu Chih-kuang's university years, the student legal service club primarily provided legal consultation through correspondence. After launching face-to-face consultations, they were frequently asked by citizens whether they could provide legal aid in litigation. This made the club members at the time acutely aware of the gap between services and practical needs, leaving a lingering regret in their hearts that eventually became the seed for promoting the Legal Aid Act in Taiwan.

In 1998, Attorney Cheng Wen-lung brought up the regret regarding Miranda rights from their university days to Director Wu Chih-kuang once again, which catalyzed the JRF's Legal Aid Act study group. Attorneys such as Lin Yung-sung, Cheng Wen-lung, Hsieh Cheng-ta, Chu Jui-yang, Cheng Wen-ling, and Professor Wu Chih-kuang referenced systems from various countries to draft the provisions.

2. The Times Shape Legal Aid: The National Consultative Conference on Judicial Reform Establishes Three Core Principles of Legal Aid

Fortunately, the 1999 National Consultative Conference on Judicial Reform provided a timely final push to this bill—which initially lacked a clear advocacy timeline—and made three major contributions to the passage of the Legal Aid Act:

1. It drastically shortened the timeframe for constructing the legal aid system.
2. The Ministry of Justice and the Judicial Yuan successively submitted drafts: The Ministry of Justice was the competent authority for attorneys at the time, and the Attorney Regulation Act also contained provisions concerning "ordinary legal aid." However, taking into account financial resources, primary responsibilities, and structural frameworks, the Judicial Yuan was ultimately designated as the competent authority.
3. Consensus between the private and official drafts included the consideration of a public財團法人 (foundation) model¹, the design of the attorney remuneration system², and qualification standards³.
   

"Having one's dream come true—legal aid may not be the accomplishment I am most proud of, but it is probably the most comforting. I hope that my other dream, the abolition of the death penalty, will also come true in my lifetime."

"Making a dream come true requires the concerted efforts of many. The inception of many systems stems from both coincidence and necessity," Director Wu Chih-kuang reflected with emotion.

Looking back at the Three Major Judicial Reform Bills from over 20 years ago, subsequent developments went most smoothly for the Legal Aid Act. Although the Judges Act passed several years later, it had been modified beyond recognition. The Judicial Yuan Organization Act may still not be fully amended to this day. Fortunately, the Legal Aid Act was passed and implemented fully and completely, marking a very important institutional establishment and operation.

III. The Present of Legal Aid: Challenges of Quality and Quantity

(Speaker / Chu Fang-chun, Director of the Legal Affairs Department, Legal Aid Foundation)

"Must applicants for legal aid be low-income or lower-middle-income households?"
"What is the win rate for cases assisted by legal aid?"
"How much money can attorneys make by doing legal aid work?"
"Do legal aid attorneys rely purely on passion, or are there other motivations?"
"Does legal aid only help bad people? Why only help suspects?"
"Since legal aid is free, is the work just done carelessly?"

Attorney Chu Fang-chun took the initiative to invite questions from the audience, using the opportunity to address common misunderstandings and myths about the Legal Aid Foundation one by one.

1. Building a Nationwide Legal Aid Platform at the Cost of Loose Change

At its inception, the Legal Aid Foundation prioritized protecting citizens without financial means. In 2004, the number of application cases was approximately 18,000, with 7,640 cases approved for aid. Today, as it shoulders broader expectations from various units and provides more extensive services, annual applications have reached 100,000, with approximately 65,000 cases approved for aid.

In the past, attorneys did not need to advertise and would still have business sitting at home. With the gradual transformation of the judicial system, the practice environment and sources of cases for attorneys have both changed; attorneys can no longer sit idly waiting for cases to arrive, and the number of legal aid attorneys has correspondingly grown to over 10,000. The rapid growth of business, budgets, and manpower means that the management of legal aid is no longer just self-management by a small unit, but increasingly resembles a collaborative platform.

The service capacity of the Legal Aid Foundation is quite substantial. So, how much money is funded by taxpayers each year? The answer is an average of NT$ 70 per person!

Attorney Chu Fang-chun joked that when attending international forums, personnel from various countries are always astonished that the Legal Aid Foundation can accomplish so much—something that is nearly impossible in many countries.

2. Irreplaceable Positioning, Value Beyond Numbers

Public opinion frequently and mistakenly assumes that legal aid only helps bad people. However, theoretically speaking, who a bad person is and how bad someone is still relies on evidence to speak for itself, and judgments must still be made by judges in individual cases (whether professional judges or lay judges).

It is also common for individuals to demonize attorneys based on individual case circumstances, equating attorneys taking on cases with supporting crime and viewing them as agents of the devil trying to help wrongdoers escape punishment. Attorney Chu reminded everyone that unless the judiciary is fake and trials are acted out, attorneys are simply fulfilling their responsibilities to their clients as part of their job.

Furthermore, those high-profile criminal cases that capture public attention often account for only a small fraction of the Legal Aid Foundation's case volume and budget.

In terms of clientele, about 10,000-plus are low-income and lower-middle-income households, while the vast majority still fall under asset qualification standards. To ensure that citizens do not fail to receive aid due to rigid wording when experiencing life shocks or finding themselves disadvantaged, legal aid's standards incorporate considerable flexibility, hoping to catch every citizen in need of legal assistance to the greatest extent possible.

In terms of case types, criminal cases account for 47% of legal aid-assisted events, with fraud cases being the most numerous, followed by assault, drug offenses, money laundering prevention acts, and theft; domestic relations cases account for 12%, and administrative cases account for 260. Although the numbers for certain types of cases are small, their significance is profound.

Looking globally, legal aid cases can actually be undertaken by bar associations. However, from Taiwan's localized experience, the legitimacy of the state allocating funds to establish the Legal Aid Foundation goes without saying—connecting civil society groups (such as the JRF, disability organizations, human trafficking support groups, and debt-burdened groups), allocating resources, assisting with appropriate cases, and finding a balance between the state and the people. Specifically, legal aid also assists with major crises, highly complex cases, large-scale collective lawsuits involving numerous plaintiffs⁴, or acts as a backstop and connector in newly filed lay judge cases⁵ and compulsory psychiatric hospitalization cases.

Legal aid also places great emphasis on attorney quality. Regardless of whether someone's motivation for becoming a legal aid attorney is to maintain living expenses, accumulate practical experience, or participate in training through the legal aid identity, imperfect individuals exist in any group. The mission of legal aid is, regardless of motivation, to work together with the Legal Aid Foundation to handle every single case well. People are enabled to become ordinary human beings precisely because they possess the power of many rights, and maintaining these requires the efforts of all sectors. Legal aid will continue to strive forward in the future.

IV. The Present of Legal Aid: Legal Aid and Judicial Reform

(Speaker / Chou Han-wei, CEO of the Legal Aid Foundation)

1. From Aiding Clients to Catalyst for Change in the Legal Profession

An audience member asked: "Why should attorneys take on legal aid cases?"

Nowadays, legal aid has instead started pioneering demands that are relatively rare in the legal profession, creating demand through undertaking such specialized projects. For example, in the past when renting housing, landlords would state that applying for rental subsidies was not allowed. Later, the Ministry of Interior protected tenants' rights, but once applied for, landlords would inevitably become angry. We therefore used a Ministry of Interior project to ensure that tenants could have attorney assistance in situations of power asymmetry. In the past, legal aid assisted clients, but now it also creates new demands for the legal profession.

Attorney Fan Kuang-chun, a former chairman of legal aid, expressed his expectation while serving as Secretary-General of the Judicial Yuan: "Justice for the people." For instance, he once requested judges and prosecutors to address defendants as "Mr." or "Ms.," allowing defendants to sit rather than stand.

However, today's judicial environment faces many challenges: rapidly increasing case volumes, overworked judicial personnel, a massive drain of talent making the transmission of experience difficult, coupled with rapid social changes, frequent legislative amendments, and trends toward professional specialization—all of which challenge the realization of "justice for the people." The public hopes judges will be professional, empathetic to the needs of litigants, and capable of conversing with them. Judicial reform issues are becoming increasingly complex and have never stopped.

The JRF places great emphasis on individual case rescue, which holds historical significance in judicial history, such as the wrongful conviction rescues of Hsiu Tzu-chiang and Su Chien-ho. The JRF and legal aid have maintained deep cooperation in institutional tracking, monitoring, and legal education promotion.

2. The Pathway of Change in Taiwan's Legal Community

To solve the problems of judicial reform, people convene national consultative conferences on judicial reform and conduct comparative legal research internationally.

Taking comparative legal research as an example, at the 2016 Ontario Legal Aid Forum, a speaker noted: "Justice is not a fruit salad where you can add whatever you like; add some granola, add an apple, and it becomes a delicious salad. Justice is more like a cake—water, wheat, temperature, and humidity all blended together affect the process and outcome of judicial reform."

Taking Taiwan's *Consumer Debt Clearance Act* as an example, when liquidation exemption was first launched, the regulations were almost entirely copied from Japan. In Japan, the exemption rate was 90%; under the same regulations, our exemption rate was 7%. This experience highlights that comparative legal research can serve as a reference, but empirical investigation is even more crucial.

Both the United States and Hong Kong have conducted people-centric judicial empirical investigations. These survey results reveal how respective judicial environments—including attorney distribution, judicial systems, and the legal community environment—create various obstacles to justice. For instance, about 90% of attorneys in Taiwan are concentrated in Taipei, which clearly demonstrates the unequal distribution of resources.

Taiwan has also conducted similar empirical research, such as the report commissioned by the National Human Rights Commission and conducted by Assistant Professor Hsu Ching-fang, titled <An Empirical Legal Study on Taiwan's Mandatory Defense System>. This article notes that Taiwan possesses a four-pillar defense system: legal aid, obligatory defense, public defenders, and self-retained attorneys.

The paper mentions that legal aid should strengthen connections to prevent courts from waiting too long. Comparing mandatory defense designs across countries reveals that legal aid's advantage lies in using horizontal connections to match defenders more suitably with defendants—providing not only legal expertise and fighting for guilt or innocence, but also broader support.

3. From Arbitrators to a Wholistic Approach to Justice

Looking at Taiwan in recent years, the most severe issue has been fraud cases. What we see at legal aid are three types of scams run by fraud syndicates: swindling money, swindling credit, and swindling bank accounts. With just a single phone call, for the sake of deception, they can handle any problem for you.

A legislator in parliament kept claiming that "legal aid is only helping wicked fraudsters," but most fraud cases handled by legal aid are mandatory defense cases or carry the label of disadvantaged groups. The JRF began paying attention to the social phenomena behind fraud cases very early on, but subsequent efforts require the entire legal community to work together.

Research in New Zealand has also recognized that if a dispute resolution system is to be designed, conflicts should be prevented in daily life; if they cannot be avoided, a third party should provide ADR (Alternative Dispute Resolution), channeling cases according to their complexity and tier, in order to effectively rationalize the proportion and volume of cases at all tiers of the court system.

As Richard Susskind stated in *Online Courts and the Future of Justice*, access to justice should avoid, deter, and resolve disputes. It is also necessary to promote legal health so that people know what rights they possess and can obtain the protections they deserve.

Today, the roles of judges in courts of many countries are shifting toward "wholistic" and "client-in-the-center" approaches—establishing community legal centers, promoting digital legal services, and so forth. All of these highlight that judges are no longer pure arbitrators, representing an irresistible trend for contemporary legal professionals.

Legal aid cases are, in fact, court cases because legal aid exists precisely because there are so many cases in court. The judiciary is the last line of defense for justice; despite differences in viewpoints, we must still face shared social problems and join hands to find the best solutions.

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1. Considering financial capacity and initiative, a public-private partnership was decided upon at the time, unlike some countries where bar associations take the lead.
2. The attorney remuneration system integrated French and German experiences. The difference from Taiwan is that in France, it is statutory, so the standards given to court-appointed or legal aid attorneys are relatively clear, yet it features a "base unit" that can be adjusted at any time, coupled with comprehensive considerations such as the Judicial Yuan's attitude. Legal aid remuneration in other countries can reach about 50% to 80% of market rates. Although there is certainly room for reasonable adjustments in Taiwan today, the basic framework of the legal aid attorney remuneration system has already achieved a certain level of effectiveness.
3. Taiwan is not a welfare state. If "lack of financial resources" were simply copied from the Public Assistance Act, the standard would be overly strict, covering very few people. The original intent of the legal aid system remains hoping to expand the scope of care as much as possible; therefore, legal aid has established independent qualification standards to cover the shortcomings of social assistance.
4. Such as the Consumer Debt Clearance Act, the RCA pollution incident, the Typhoon Morakot disaster, and the collapse of the Weiguan Building.
5. Approximately 66% of newly filed cases under the Citizen Judges Act are undertaken by the Legal Aid Foundation.