Mr. Bing Huang Zhang graduated from NTU law, now is the Managing Director and CEO of United Asia Finance Limited in Hong Kong. On account of devoting in promoting public welfare, meanwhile paying the attention to the development of Taiwan legal studies, Mr. Zhang has founded “the Maestro’s Lecture” to provide for academic. Using this opportunity, we held a seminar with Institutum Iurisprudentiae, Academia Sinica, and honestly invited the professor Adrian Vermeule from Harvard law school to give a speech, who was elected the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2012, specializing in Constitution and Administrative Law.
The speech topic was about his book “The Constitution of Risk”, which was published last year. Prof. Vermeule brought a new way of thinking about the constitutionalism which broadened our horizon. He explained the two models of constitutionalism, one is Precautionary Constitutionalism, and the other is Optimizing Constitutionalism. Based on the latter theory, he argued that modern constitutionalism should open a door for public powers to private sector in protection of people’s liberty from harm and merely taking the constitutional rules as tyranny avoiding or abuse preventive is mistaken. To support his argument, he incorporated some modeling theories for risk regulations, such as the concepts of countervailing risks in contrast with target risks.
In this seminar, participants were very interested in the utility and the possibility of the functionality of the presenter’s theory and whether it can truly provide a guideline for constitution modification. This seminar attracted highly attention, in addition to our students, the prof. Chin-Wen Wu from National Chengchi University College of law and the prof. Ren-Chuan Kao from National Taipei University College of law also brought their students to join. All participants actively interacted and communicated in the seminar. They systemically recognized the meaning of the constitution, liberty and risk, and used a comparative way to think the case differences between U.S and Taiwan. This seminar brought great benefit for our department as to promote the international academic exchanges. We will continually invite the scholars from other countries, and welcome teachers and students to join these activities to enjoy the feast of knowledge altogether.
