Cool off on divisive divorce lawBy Sandy Chou 周宜勳The Legislative Yuan’s Legal Affairs Bureau has introduced a 30-day cooling-off period for couples contemplating divorce, a concept already adopted by South Korea and China. In April 2009, the legislature amended the law, recognizing that judges can settle divorce proceedings without mediation focused on reconciliation. My doctoral dissertation, published in 2008, was the first large-scale attitudinal survey of Taiwanese and judges on divorce mediation, research that is relevant to the current legislative debate. American feminist academics have argued that mandatory divorce mediation — regardless of whether it aims for reconciliation — is disadvantageous to women. In the US, mandatory pretrial mediation is by no means a tradition, and the aim of divorce mediation has never been reconciliation.
