papersubmittedto2011lawandsocietyannualmeeting,.docVIP

Paper Submitted to 2011 Law and Society Annual Meeting, June 2-5, 2011 Westin St. Francis Hotel, San Francisco, CA, USA Legal Knowledge Practice of Lawyers and Non-Lawyers in the Divorce Mediation in Taiwan Shu-chin Grace Kuo SJD, Northwestern University School of Law Associate Professor of Law, National Cheng Kung University 1 University Rd., 70101Tainan City, TAIWAN gracekuo@.tw *unfinished draft circulated within the panel only* Keyword Legal Knowledge, Lawyers, Non-lawyers, Legal Professional, Anthropology of Law, Family Dispute Mediation, Mediators, Ethnography of Law, Family Law Introduction My whole project aims to delineate the legal knowledge involved in the family dispute resolution process and to identify the trajectory where legal knowledge and family law jurisprudence are formed. Mediation has been described for a long time and characterized as a more flexible, more efficient, and so it is a better dispute resolution mechanism when it is compared to litigation. However, in this project, I hope to offer a different point of view of mediation. I will argue that mediation, as one form of dispute resolution, may not be so much different comparing with litigation. Indeed, mediation and litigation are all framed by legal doctrinal structures, document production, and legal technicalities. Borrowing Riles’ term of legal technicalities, I will argue that these elements, doctrinal structures, documents, and technicalities, all form the each stage of dispute settlement process both in litigations and mediations. Based on my legal anthropological research finding, I will provide another framework to talk about the mediation, particularly I will focus on the divorce mediation. I employ the “legal knowledge” theory to comprehend the actors’ knowledge practice in divorce mediation. Meanwhile, I will particularly assert that the dispute settlement progress de facto is reframed by varied knowledge performed by each participant (actors, including lawyer