Judicial Dialogue or Monologue? Exploring Noncompliance with Judicial Rulings

Recent decades have witnessed the mushroom of constitutional courts around the globe. Nevertheless, constitutional interpretation is a politically risky enterprise: some constitutional courts encounter vehement political backlash and have been dismantled. Even for those that survive the political attack, not all courts are equally successful in checking the political branches and protecting fundamental rights. Using the Taiwan Constitutional Court as an example, this paper suggests that there are three dimensions of failure: 1) judicial decisions are simply ignored by the political branches as if it did not exist; 2) judicial decisions are not implemented in time; 3) judicial decisions are implemented in a wrong way that is not what the Constitutional Court demanded or expected. The fact that judicial decisions are not always faithfully implemented by the political branches further casts doubt on, among other things, the effectiveness of judicial dialogue.