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Yun-Ru Chen (National Taiwan University, Taiwan)

Yun-Ru Chen is an associate professor of law at National Taiwan University. Her research interests focus on the versatility of the family across multiple levels from transnational perspectives, ranging from strategies in individual lives, its positions in the political economy of transforming states, to its roles in constructing national identities. She teaches areas of family law, legal history, legal theory (critical legal studies & legal realism), and globalization of law.

Taking colonial Taiwan as the vantage point, Prof. Chen’s doctoral dissertation suggests that ideas about nations and families were far from homogenous in the colonial encounter. She argues that it is not necessary that family law should play a reactionary role in developing nationalism in non-western societies. Her dissertation, awarded the best East Asian law thesis at Harvard Law School (The Yong K. Kim Prize), is being adapted into a book with the provisional title, “Paradoxes of the National Family Law in (Post-)Colonial East Asia: Taiwan as the Nexus.” Drawing on firsthand litigation records across successive political regimes, she has written extensively about how ordinary men and women interact with governmental entities, emphasizing how they adopt (and transform) both new and traditional methods of narrating legal stories. Currently, she is investigating the contractual, fluid, and thus "unorthodox" aspects of family traditions in Taiwan and East Asia.

Professor Chen received her Doctor of Juridical Science (SJD) from Harvard Law School and completed her master's degree and Bachelor of Laws (LL.B.), with a minor in Economics, at National Taiwan University. She also successfully passed both the bar and judicial exams in Taiwan. At present, she is engaged as a guest researcher at the Waseda Institute for East Asian Legal Studies and serves as the secretary-general of the Taiwanese Legal History Association.

Progressive Family Law as an Anticolonial Strategy: The Case of (Post-) Colonial Taiwan
Yun-Ru Chen
If nationalism seems dangerous in the eyes of progressive, cosmopolitan intellectuals in the West and beyond, so does nationalist family law. Anti-colonial nationalists are often recognized for developing distinctive family laws and upholding, or even creating, conservative practices like widow-burning in India and polygamy under Islamic law. During the anti-colonial struggle, indigenous nationalists regarded family laws as repositories of legal consciousness. Nevertheless, they often accepted Western market notions and legal mechanisms as vital for fortifying the post-colonial nation. Consequently, the family emerged as the last bastion of conservatives and neo-traditionalists. Nationalists who advocated for liberal family laws—whether modern, progressive, or egalitarian—frequently found themselves trapped in identity debates. Using Japan-ruled Taiwan (1895-1945) as a case study, this paper presents an alternative narrative to the conventional understanding. It posits that progressive family laws, alongside civic nationalism, can serve as a means of resisting colonialism. In colonial Taiwan, the shared Chinese heritage and perceived cultural and ethnic similarities between the Japanese colonizers and the Taiwanese colonized made it less effective for Taiwanese nationalists to rely on indigenous traditions for a distinct nationalist identity. Instead, the Taiwanese had considerable latitude to reform family law and depart from orthodox Confucian familism, advocating for a unique yet liberal family law. Under “oriental colonialism,” Taiwanese anti-colonial nationalists endeavored to demonstrate that Taiwanese family customs (e.g., equal inheritance among sons) were not only distinct but also more “advanced” than Japanese family law (e.g., primogeniture). This suggests that family law does not necessarily play a reactionary role in nationalism. Furthermore, the paper argues that the contemporary geopolitical context of Taiwan continues to endorse progressive nationalism and family law, as demonstrated by the legalization of same-sex marriage in 2019.