Some people say that legal language was always meant to be read by those with legal expertise. But curious minds want to know: Why does it have to be so impenetrable? Couldn’t laws be written in a more straightforward manner, so that anyone could read and understand them?

Sometimes a bit of pithy wisdom can get people to see the light. The Plain Law Movement’s GIF memes do hit the funny bone, but they also shake people out of their reluctance to learn about the law. (screenshots from PLM website)

Explainers to the rescue?

Many people within the legal profession have begun to take an interest in this issue.

As the Legislative Yuan began reviewing the Cross-Strait Service Trade Agreement (CSSTA) in 2014, students took to the streets in the “Sunflower Movement” to oppose ratification. Suddenly the Internet was awash with “CSSTA for dummies” packages crafted to familiar­ize readers with the nuts and bolts of the issue. But the result was a cacophony of conflicting interpreta­tions. Were these explainers giving straight-up facts, or were they putting their own spin on things? The general public couldn’t tell one way or the other.

Yang Kuei-chih, an attorney and the founder of the Plain Law Movement (PLM) website, explains what prompted him to create the website in 2014: “Every ‘CSSTA for dummies’ package on the Internet had its own take on things, and some were pretty off-the-wall. The upshot was that ordinary citizens couldn’t get a grasp of the legal basics.”

To shed light on the CSSTA issue, Yang and some good friends started writing up explanatory texts on the agreement and posting them to the Internet. Using language understandable to non-experts, their lucid style helped to dispel the longstanding notion that ­legal writings are not for the layman. Yang’s group began to attract growing attention.

After the student movement faded away, the PLM website gradually wrote less on the CSSTA and morphed into today’s offering, which takes an interest in lots of other social issues, such as preventive detention, the Fourth ­Nuclear Power Plant, and marriage equality. Articles on the PLM site are always very timely, and use accessible language to lay out the facts on current events. PLM makes waves in the social media world quite frequently.

PLM’s great popularity stems from its use of the language of youth, which lowers the bar for understanding the law. Once stuffy legalese has been repackaged by PLM, people suddenly find it interesting, and completely comprehensible. All the gag-inducing whence and whereas wordings found in court judgments, lovingly recrafted by PLM and Facebook content editors, are suddenly as readable as a novel.

Yang Kuei-chih invites democracy and human rights activists to speak on Plain Law Radio. The podcast received a prize at the 2020 Excellent Journalism Awards.

Tainaners’ congee-gal rights

This past April, PLM posted an article entitled “Court Has Spoken: Whether Northerners Like It or Not, Tainan People Have a Right to Congee for Breakfast.” The article went viral. A 66-year-old man finished working a graveyard shift and took a roundabout path to get a bowl of savory rice congee for breakfast on his way home. After finishing breakfast he got into a traffic accident, and filed with the Bureau of Labor Insurance to receive compensation for an occupational injury. But the bureau rejected the claim on the grounds that the man had taken such a long detour that the crash didn’t qualify as a work commute accident. The old fellow sued the BLI and won a favorable judgment. In effect, the court’s decision stood as recognition that the people of Tainan have the right to savory congee for breakfast.

A storyteller par excellence, PLM goes so far as borrowing from fairytales to work legal concepts into its ­reporting. In its Instagram series #A Fairy Tale Never Told, PLM explores legal issues that come up in fairytales that we’ve all known since childhood. In Legend of the White Snake, for example, the white snake uses her powers to flood Jinshan Temple and rescue the one she loves, but in doing so she breaks the law by endangering public safety. Then there is the legend of hot-headed Leigong, the god of thunder, who in a fit of pique kills an innocent woman, thus committing the crime of negligent manslaughter. Chief creative officer Liau Po-wei, who is in charge of this series, explains: “When you get serious about what you’re up to, readers are going to find it a lot more entertaining.”

After the Sunflower Movement of 2014 sparked debate over the legal aspects of the Cross-Strait Service Trade Agreement, Yang Kuei-chih and friends from legal circles set up a website to educate the public about the agreement. The site later morphed into today’s Plain Law Movement. (photo by Kent Chuang)

The unnoticed Daily Cold

Daily Cold, a daily legal literacy column once managed by Yang Kuei-chih, presents knotty legal issues in a series it calls Bizarre and Insane Laws You Should Know About. For example, someone who gives an engagement ring and then backs out of the proposed marriage can ask to get the ring back, but cannot ask for the return of an iPhone or name-brand purse given during the courtship. Says Yang: “A lot of everyday things that we don’t much notice actually have legal implications. That’s what makes Daily Cold so interesting.”

In addition to communicating via social media, PLM also hires legal experts as contributing bloggers. The website has an editing team to ensure high-quality content. PLM produces a legal affairs podcast called Plain Law Radio. Democracy and human rights activists from Taiwan are invited to speak on the programs, which are streamed via Apple Podcasts and Spotify and attract some 20‡30,000 listeners per show. The show received a prize in the podcast category at the 2020 Excellent Journal­ism Awards.

The Plain Law Movement focuses on a wide range of social issues and works to bring the public up to speed on related legal matters.

Young target audience

Liau Po-wei is responsible for getting PLM website content onto social media. In addition to the Instagram series #A Fairy Tale Never Told, he also administers a series called #Everyday Things You Didn’t Know Were Criminal, introduces the podcasts, and handles another series named #Never Would Have Known but for the PLM Report, which was specially created as a “home” for one-off topics that defy categorization. Liau chuckles: “All that other miscellaneous current affairs stuff gets hit with this tag.”

Virtually everyone on the PLM team is young and quite familiar with the expressions and memes that are popular among youth. The discussion topics they come up with (such as “Is there a problem with releasing a bunch of cockroaches in a restaurant?” or “If you changed your name to ‘Salmon’ and now regret it, is there anything you can do?”) always elicit a huge response, and sometimes the team members get directly involved in the online chats they’ve started up.

Liau Po-wei has noticed that PLM has a lot of influence with youth: “When people younger than 25‡30 years old want to find out about some legal issue or other, we are the first information source that comes to mind.”

The Plain Law Movement takes a humorous approach in explaining the law. Content from its website has been published in book form to rave reviews.

Boosting legal literacy

This PLM-led move toward better legal literacy is currently bearing fruit on the Internet, and dovetails nicely with the idea that Yang Kuei-chih had in mind when he first founded the Plain Law Movement: “The point of PLM isn’t to simplify legal language. The point is to get people interested in the law.” What PLM cares most about is the fundamentals, because if people don’t have a mature understanding of democracy, the rule of law, and human rights, then it’s hard to expect our society to progress in the direction of something better.

Says Yang: “We want people to care about the law, and to care about society, because we depend on the legal system to run our society.”

Yang and his partners feel that Taiwan still doesn’t properly appreciate the importance of legal education. In pushing the Plain Law Movement, their hope is that members of the general public will come to understand the value of legal knowledge, and will become better versed in the subject. Therein lies the value and significance of PLM.

There’s no saying whether the legal knowledge people pick up thanks to PLM’s efforts will ever actually come in handy, but a person does need to make use of the law from time to time, and when the need arises, PLM is the best gateway for leading an individual toward a better understanding of the law and a greater concern for social systems.