Judicial Review of Constitutionality: The Taiwan Experience

Date & Time: 13 January 2026 (Tuesday) 13:30-15:00

Venue: Academic Conference Room, 11/F Cheng Yu Tung Tower, The University of Hong Kong

Language: Mandarin and English (This is a bilingual event; the speaker will speak in Mandarin, with simultaneous machine-translation into English, and summaries of key points in English by the Chair of the event.)

Abstract:

On 19 December 2025, five judges of Taiwan‘s constitutional court rendered a decision declaring the quorum requirements in the constitutional litigation law to be unconstitutional. At the same time, three other judges of the court issued a statement alleging that the decision by the five judges was invalid as the court was not lawfully constituted. This lecture reviews the development of constitutional judicial review in Taiwan, and considers several practical issues: (1) the division of labour between the constitutional court and other courts, (2) the efficacy of the constitutional court’s work, and (3) judicial independence and security of status of constitutional court judges.

Speaker：

Professor Dennis Tang （湯德宗）, Wang Shao-Yu Chair Professor of Law at Soochow University, served as a Judge of the Taiwan Constitutional Court in 2011-19. He was the Founding Director and Distinguished Research Professor of the Institutum Iurisprudentiae, Academia Sinica in 2004-2011. He has taught at the National Taiwan University since 1989, specializing in constitutional, administrative, and environmental law. He has also held visiting professorships at HKU (2019), New York University (2015), and Tokyo University (2001).

Chair:

Professor Albert H.Y. Chen, Cheng Chan Lan Yue Professor and Chair of Constitutional Law, Faculty of Law, The University of Hong Kong

This is an in-person event. Prior registration is required. Please visit https://bit.ly/3YkrC6J to register. For inquiries, please email Louisa at .

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