Western Legal Traditions for »Laying Down Taiwan’s Indigenous Customs in Writing«

Abstract

The question of what the law is may preoccupy some legal theorists. Answering it is definitely the legal professionals’ nightmare. Constitutional and statutory requirements now require Taiwan’s officials and lawyers to confront the problem of ascertaining and applying indigenous customs in the exercise of all state powers. Yet, the most widely accepted juridical concept of custom results in a choice between two evils, to wit, breaching either the general duty to uphold law or the concrete obligation to respect indigenous values. So far, efforts have only been made to document the customs, but the documentation thus produced is too ethnographic to be legally useful. The challenge, therefore, is one of translation. Values are to be carried from an indigenous world into the modern one, and the little-known form of custom is to be expressed in the language of the science of law.
This paper argues for the translation of indigenous customs with conceptions available in an array of examples from European legal history. This paper explains that, in cases like Taiwan, the solutions known to the English-speaking literature all end in the dilemma I call »modern state centralism« (MSC). The solutions are divided into two types: legal pluralism and Francisco Suárez’s conception of custom. The former defeats itself in that its criticism against the state’s monopoly of law amounts to suggesting that the state tolerate all kinds of non-state normativity. The latter reduces to MSC because recent literature ignores Suárez’s legal historical references and important studies written in German. The rest of the section shows how »non-modern« legal techniques may help. This paper concludes by suggesting that the concept pair of law and custom be dissociated from four others, to wit, written and unwritten law, state and society, law in books and law in action, and, finally, alien and native law.