Activism and/or Business:
Plain Law Movement in the Context of Knowledge Consumerism
‘How to survive?’ is the question that haunts every social movement-based new media. Recently in Taiwan, popularisation of law – namely, to cultivate greater popular legal consciousness and knowledge – becomes an important social phenomenon, not least since the Sunflower Student Movement in 2014. Different groups of legal professionals and law students have created multiple social media and online platforms, for instance, Focusing Constitution, Case Brief, Follaw, Plain Law Movement (PLM), and so on.
To contextualise, this paper identifies two rationales that make this phenomenon not only desirable but also necessary: first, a persistent lack of public confidence in the judiciary, and second, a popular desire to ‘transparentise’ the government while witnessing the events regarding Cross-Strait Service Trade Agreement, which led to the outbreak of the Sunflower Student Movement. Both contextual factors have contributed to the demand for a social movement that challenges all kinds of official authority, political rhetoric, and related ruling power – out of which law and its by-product legal professionalism are considered as one of the most opaque and mystified institutions.
Drawing on participant observation in PLM and locating it in the context described above, this paper attempts to understand the contributions and challenges that PLM has made and encountered. Considering PLM’s translative approach – assuming the original language in law as incomprehensible to the public that requires translating it into ‘plain language’ – as cirque of professionalism in the juridical field (Bourdieu, 1977), such an approach actually faces several challenges. They include decreasing popular interest in law vis-à-vis the resurgence of legal professionalism, the resilience of the juridical field vis-à-vis rising anti-intellectualism in Taiwan, and all of them have affected the legitimacy and sustainability of both PLM and related social movement.
Wishing to survive, PLM has been oscillating between social activism, social enterprise and/or a new business. Reflecting on their development, PLM and others have taken up a consumerist-oriented strategy concerning knowledge communication, and such ‘knowledge consumerism’ has restrained their critical abilities for a larger social change. That is, knowledge consumerism has nonetheless re-positioned this social movement back to the place to help repair the shaken authority of legal professionalism.
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