Hui-Ching Chang

Law-related scholarly interests: With my research interest in culture and communication. I tend to pay special attention to cultural foundations of rules, norms, and laws, and how they reflect and regulate communicative activities. Specifically, there are two directions I hope to explore:

First, my current research in Taiwanese political language and identity issues directly addressed issues of law. These include how Taiwanese laws have been revised and/or abolished to make a more democratic society, how Taiwanese laws mark its distinctive identity from the identity of the PRC, how Taiwanese laws regulate its increasing contact with China, and so on.

I am exploring the possibility of collaborating with legal scholars in Taiwan on research projects such as (a) how Taiwan has transformed from “Chinese laws” to “Taiwanese laws” to reflect its increasing local consciousness; and (b) how Taiwan’s communication policies and laws must continually be revised to suit the needs of a fully fledged democratic society, following the lifting of martial law in 1987.

Second, I am interested in exploring how cross-examination is introduced and utilized in Taiwan's courtrooms, and what cultural problems such implementation might have encountered. While cross-examination is commonly practiced in American courtrooms, it has not been used until recently in other cultural contexts, such as Taiwanese. This new form of justice system involves not only legal issues, but more importantly, changes in legal communicative practices involving unique cultural parameters. I'd be very interested in cooperating with scholars to conduct cross-cultural comparisons on cross-examination as legal discourse.