Dr. Te-Chung Tang (“Dennis T. C. Tang”) is The Honorable Justice, Constitutional Court (Judicial Yuan), Republic of China (Taiwan). Before he assumed his post in the judicial branch on October 1, 2011, Dr. Tang had served as Distinguished Research Professor and Founding Director of the Institutum Iurisprudentiae, Academia Sinica (the highest and most prestigiousresearch institute in Taiwan) from July 2004 to September 2011. His outstanding leadership achievements include: (1) drawing up the institute’s Founding Proposal to select six core research fields and establish the development strategies, (2) recruiting a total of 12 young talented researchers from the US and Europe, (3) successfully founding the Academia Sinica Law Journal in May, 2007, (4) publishing more than 20 books/conference proceedings, as well as (5) launching various academic symposia held on a regular basis and open to the public to promote research capability among the legal community and to foster the rule-of-law consciousness among citizens, etc. As a result of these efforts and accomplishments, he set a record within the Academia Sinica in establishing (or to be more accurate, in completing the Preparatory Office stage of) a new research institute in just 7 years, about 3 years shorter than the average). Since the fall of 1989, Dr. Tang has served as Professor of Law at the Graduate Institute of National Development, National Taiwan University (joint appointment). He specializes in constitutional, administrative and environmental law, and has taught in these fields since 1989.In addition, Dr. Tang has served as legal consultant or commissioner for various government agencies, including the Commission on Government Reorganization of the Executive Yuan (the Cabinet); the Commission on Statutes and Regulations of the Ministry of the Interior and of the Environmental Protection Agency; and the Administrative Appeals Commission of the Ministry of Education, Ministry of Defense, etc. He is also a member of the IUCN (The World Conservation Union) International Commission on Environmental Law. Dr. Tang has numerous publications in Chinese. Among them, Dialogic Constitution: Constitutional Dialogue, Tang’s audiobook on the ROC Constitution (two volumes,3rd ed. 2015& 2016) is the first college constitutional textbook to provide audio CDs to facilitate comprehension. The two-volume, 1200-page treatise, Separation of Powers Revisited (4th ed. 2014), represents the fruits of his persistent efforts for over a decade to fashion a new theory called “Separation of Powers for Dynamic Balances.” The Treatise on the Administrative Procedure Act (2nd ed. 2003) elaborates, in more than 550 pages, the various “Due Process” requirements contained in this milestone act, and their implications. In Proposals for Integrating Functions Concerning Nature Conservation into the Central Departments: With Reflections on Practices in Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, Denmark and the Netherlands (1998) (with contributions by Ren-Her Hsien, Chien-En Sung & Ching-Ning Yang), he strongly advocates the establishment of a “Ministry of Environmental Resources.” His advocacy was eventually codified in the Organization Act of the Executive Yuan (Cabinet) of 2010. However, due to various political reasons, the Ministry has not officially been established (reorganized) yet. Additionally, in Reforming Recycling in Taiwan: Lessons from the U.K., Germany, Sweden, Japan and the U.S.A. (1997) (with contributions by Chun-Seng Chen), Dr. Tang urges Taiwan’s government to overhaul the impractical legal regime governing recycling, based upon key aspects of what is known as the “producer responsibility principle.”In addition, his two new books, entitled “Fundamental Rights Revisited” and “Treatise on Information Rights,” are in the final stage of publication (forthcoming).Dr. Tang’s English language articles have appeared in several international law reviews, including the Administrative Law Review, Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law, and Pacific Rim Law & Policy Journal in the US, as well as 1993 Jahrbuch des Umwelt-und-Technikrechts in Germany. He also contributed a chapter on the situation in Taiwan in Environmental Law and Enforcement in the Asia-Pacific Rim (Sweet & Maxwell, 2002). With all such sincere efforts and fruitful publications, Dr. Tang was appointed as a distinguished research professor by Academia Sinica in 2009, the first and the only one then in the field of law. Prof. Tang received his Bachelor of Laws and Master of Laws from the National Taiwan University in 1978 and 1981, respectively, Master of Laws (LL.M.) from Harvard Law School, USA in 1984, and his Doctor of Juridical Science (S.J.D.) degree from Tulane Law School, New Orleans, USA in 1989.He was awarded a scholarship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and served as a visiting scholar at Cologne University in Germany from 1993 to 1994.During the autumn of 2001, he was invited by Tokyo University Law School as probably the first Taiwanese visiting law professor to teach with the Faculty of Law. From Sept. 26 to Oct. 25, 2015, Justice Tang was invited by the US-Asia Law Institute, School of Law, New York University, USA to conduct a visiting teaching seminar on “Constitutionalism and Constitutional Review on Taiwan” (in English). During that brief engagement at New York University he was also invited to deliver a lecture on the topic of “The Constitutional Review on Taiwan” at Harvard Law School, Yale Law School and U. Penn. Law School respectively. In June of 2015, he was invited to give similar lectures at Trier University and Freiburg University, Germany as well as the Swiss Institute of Comparative Law in Lausanne. In addition, he was the first Justice of the Republic of China invited by the People’s Republic of China to deliver a keynote speech on “Constitutional Review of Equal Protection on Taiwan” at the Annual Forum on Peaceful Development of the Taiwan Strait (August 5, 2015 in Nanjing, China). |