Where does the legal profession’s identity originate from? How do we explain the intra-professional variations, as multiple legal professions diverge in their political orientations? This paper argues that the legal profession critically develops their core identity resisting incumbent rule when the state undergoes fundamental power reconfiguration. It is their political position as opposed to power in a critical juncture of state transformation that determines the legal profession’s collective ideal of who they are and what actions they take. Drawing on 133 interviews with Taiwanese judges, lawyers, and prosecutors, extensive fieldwork, and archival data up to the 1990s, this paper demonstrates how democratization shapes professional identity. As respective professions experienced different levels and models of authoritarian containment, they took separate trajectories to challenge the Kuomintang’s party-state and pledge to different normative commitments. Taiwanese judges categorically defend judicial independence, lawyers advocate for people’s rights, and prosecutors marshal under justice to check abuse of power.

Sociolegal studies have identified a collectivity of legal actors—the legal complex—and its association with political liberalism in varying power settings. However, little attention has been paid to how such a collectivity evolves with regime change, or if and when such a collectivity might dissolve. Studying the case of Taiwan, this article demonstrates how various legal professions—lawyers, judges, and prosecutors—unite and divide during and after state transition. Democratization had an unsettling effect that brought out the internal dynamics of the legal professions, which initially aligned with one another to defend judicial autonomy from authoritarian control, but then confronted one another in judicial policy making during democratic times. Each legal profession bases its policy orientations on a normative commitment, which leads to three lines of confrontation: the ways in which the judiciary is held accountable, the extent to which the procuracy enjoys investigative power, and the institutional division between the judiciary and procuracy.

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