Civil Law and Common Law Perspectives
On October 20th several Berkeley Law professors participated in, Current Legal Issues in Taiwan and the United States, a join conference held at National Taiwan University’s College of Law in Taipei. The conference brought together legal scholars from NTU, National Central University, and Berkeley Law, as well as a high court judge of Taiwan’s Intellectual Property Court and a Justice of the Constitutional Court of Taiwan, to account for current legal issues within the realms of: (1) Regulation and governance in a commercial world; (2) Judicial reform and criminal court; (3) Separation of powers and justice.
Berkeley Law Professor and Robbins Collection Director Laurent Mayali joined Wang-Ruu Tseng, Dean of NTU’s College of Law, in delivering the event’s opening remarks. The workshop’s opening session, “Regulation and governance in a commercial world,” included two presentations followed by discussion. NTU Assistant Professor Yueh-Ping Yang opened the session with a presentation that explored the key to Taiwan’s financial institution governance reform from a nominating committee perspective. The second presenter of the opening session was UC Berkeley’s Dr. George Horvath, a lecturer and postdoctoral fellow who focuses on health law. “The Challenge of Medical Product Identity,” the topic of Dr. Horvath’s presentation, considered the various difficulties of regulating drugs, medical devices, and biological products—three medical product categories authorized by the FDA and each subject to different regulatory congressional statutes.
The workshop’s second session, “Judicial reform and criminal court,” saw no presentations from Berkeley Law participants. However, Professor Mayali served as the lead discussant for the session’s two presentations. The session included two presentations from Taiwanese representatives, the first introduced the proposed lay participation in Taiwan and the second looked at Taiwanese criminal court reform. The closing session, “Separation of powers and justice,” included Berkeley Law Professors John Yoo, Amanda Tyler, Eric Rakowski, and Andrew Bradt. Professor Yoo leadoff the session with a presentation on “Presidential Powers and Reversal,” followed by Professor Tyler’s, “Abraham Lincoln, the Civil War, and Habeas Corpus.” Professor Tyler looked critically at President Lincoln’s decision to suspend the writ of habeas corpus detain Confederate soldiers outside of the criminal process during the Civil War, a topic that is not far removed from the subject of her newest book, Habeas Corpus in Wartime. Closing the final session was Professor Rakowski’s, “Custom as Public Policy: Tying the Hands of the Dead.” The presenters were joined in discussion by the Honorable Justice Sheng-Lin Jan, In-Chin Chen of National Central University, and Andrew Bradt, Assistant Professor at Berkeley Law.
The jointly hosted event is the second time that NTU and Berkeley Law have joined forces to host a conference that brings light to current legal issues in both countries. In October of 2016, the Robbins Collection hosted a one-day workshop at Boalt Hall that included participants from National Taiwan University, including overlapping guests like NTU College of Law Dean Wang-Ruu Tseng and High Court Judge Dr. Sungmei Hsuing. The recurrence of this conference, and events similar to it, cultivates transnational connections between the Robbins Collection and preeminent legal institutions in the civil law tradition, ultimately strengthening the academic relations between Berkeley Law and legal communities around the globe.
11.14.17