These disputes were selected because each yielded enough court documents to piece together a relatively detailed picture of disputing behavior in and out of court. For this reason, they are neither highly representative nor completely anomalous. It stands to reason that many intimate disputes related to extramarital intimacy—even those where zhengxinshe play a role—are processed and resolved with little or no explicit reference to the law and no involvement of state actors such as the police, prosecutors, and the courts. Thus, what we may observe through court documents only represents the tip of an iceberg.
There is, however, a significant correlation to be identified between zhengxinshe and illicit intimacy in court documents. Keywords searches of judicial databases reveal that during the thirteen years between 2000 and 2012, on average 46% of court
documents (裁定及判決) from civil suits in district courts that contained the word
“zhengxinshe” also contained a term related to illicit intimacy (外遇, 婚外情, 通姦, 劈腿, 偷 情, 抓姦, or 捉姦). During this period, the lowest percentage of correlation was 40%, and the highest 63%.158 For criminal decisions from district courts, the thirteen-year
average was 25%, with a lowest annual percent of 11% and highest of 54%. The
158 The percentages vary each year, but there is not an obvious upward or downward trend.
Unfortunately, we are unable to look for trends in the nineties or before because of the limited range of judicial document databases.
correlation is not two-way.159 That is, only a small fraction of the total number of cases that mention illicit intimacy also mention zhengxinshe.160
In absolute terms, there is a considerable body of data to choose from the years 2000 and 2012. Unfortunately, the names of most parties to lawsuits from before 2010 have been redacted. Thus, I focused on cases from between 2010 and 2012. I looked over or read closely all of the civil and criminal decisions of the High Court161 from these three years. This approach effectively excluded disputes for which the court of first incidence was in southern or central Taiwan, or on an outlying island. This was a conscious decision intended to narrow the scope of the project for the sake of
expediency. (And, in most years the majority of High Court decisions are from Taipei, although two other major population centers, Greater Taichung and Kaohsiung, also yielded a considerable number of documents.) A more thorough investigation would also take other areas of Taiwan into account and look for regional variation.
In total, between 2000 and 2012, there were 908 criminal and civil decisions from the District Courts and all branches of the High Court in which both “zhengxinshe”
or “zhengxinye” and keywords related to illicit intimacy appear. This wealth of
information presents the researcher with a choice. One could code a significant portion of the decisions and attempt to answer questions about the relative frequency of certain phenomena. For instance, in cases where judicial documents reveal that a spouse has hired a zhengxinshe and then gone to court with the evidence obtained, is that spouse more likely to be a husband or a wife? Such methods would no doubt yield valuable
159 These searches were conducted using LawBank. Some divorce suits are not made public, so the court documents in the database do not represent all of those for this period. The absolute number of cases that mention zhengxinshe each year is not great; there was an average of 49.77 such civil cases each year from 2000 through 2012 and 75.23 for criminal cases.
160 There is a similar trend to be found in the High Courts. Between 2000 and 2012, 45.97% of court documents from civil cases that mentioned zhengxinshe also mentioned illicit intimacy.
161 The High Court is the appellate court for seven district courts in the north of Taiwan: Keelung, Yilan, Taipei, New Taipei City, Shilin, Taoyuan, and Hsinchu. 司法院行政組織系統表，
http://www.judicial.gov.tw/aboutus/aboutus04.asp（最後瀏覽日：2013年7月15日）。
information concerning the role of zhengxinshe in in-court disputing. In addition to being extremely time-consuming, however, presuming that only a small portion of intimate disputes in which zhengxinshe play a role make it to court, our findings would be limited to a tip of an iceberg.
District and High Court Documents
Related to Zhengxinshe and Illicit Intimacy by Case Type (2000-2012)
民 事 件 數 刑 事 件 數
離婚（等） 148 妨害家庭／妨害婚姻 114
（侵權行為）損害賠償 62 妨害自由／強制罪 42
「本票」相關 41 違反通訊保障及監察法（等） 6
「和解」相關 5 妨害秘密 25
其他 177 恐嚇（取財等） 44
總數 433 傷害 33
毀損（等） 10
其他 201
總數 475
Compiled by the author using LawBank.
Instead, the author has opted for a case study method, hoping that an in-depth examination of a small number of richly documented disputes would further the insights from the previous chapters. Disputes were selected based on several flexible criteria.
First, for a dispute to be selected, a zhengxinshe had to play a clear and substantial role in the intimate dispute. I passed over those intimate disputes where a zhengxinshe was mentioned as having collected evidence, but no further detail about its role could be ascertained. Second, I looked for disputes in which those who were investigated played a more active role or even “fought back.” This, I hoped, would allow me to avoid rehashing stereotyped narratives in which the beleaguered wife as protagonist toils to save her marriage from her lascivious husband and a shameless mistress. While it was difficult to locate a “mistress-as-hero” character in any of the cases I reviewed, in each of the three disputes I have chosen the “adulterers” play at least an active role, engaging
with the law, rather than being merely relegated to against the law. Finally, and most importantly, I selected disputes that could be traced across multiple engagements with the law, both civil and criminal. To do this, I ran keyword searches on each litigant’s name and other promising pieces of information such as zihao (字號), addresses, and dates in order to locate as many related court documents as possible. As a result, each case is reconstructed from a series of between seven and twelve separate court
documents spanning eight months or more.
Each case study is broken into two parts. The first is a roughly chronological narrative of the events described in court documents. I have made an attempt to include as many pertinent facts as possible. Where disputants offer differing accounts of events, I try to include both, even when one appears prima facie to be a courtroom fiction or was rejected by the court. In the narrative, I try to keep speculation and analysis to a minimum; even so, in order to provide a minimally coherent and readable narrative some speculation is necessary. It will be clearly noted by my usage of words and phrases such as “perhaps,” and “we can surmise that.” I hardly need remind the reader that these stories are merely reconstructions of social reality based on the sparse and at times suspect interpretations of the professional judiciary.
The second part of each case study is an analysis in which I identify key
junctures in each narrative when a point of law related to illicit intimacy or privacy was interpreted by a judge in a pivotal way. Taken together, these moments reveal a judicial bias that seems to privilege the abstraction of the institution of marriage and the family over other concerns such as privacy, freedom of moment, freedom of private
communication (秘密通訊自由) and sexual autonomy. The result of such bias, of course, is the apparent unequal treatment of those deemed to be “faithful” to marriage, and those stigmatized as its enemies. That is to say, they suggest how patterns in judicial
behavior produce the zhengxinshe phenomenon. While the case study method utilized in this chapter does not lend itself to a gendered (male-to-female) analysis of disputing behavior and the operations of the judicial system, the analysis sections do strongly suggest judicial bias toward those situated within heteropatriarchal monogamy.
4.3 Case Study I: The Story of Hsu Kuo-fang, Tsai Mei-ling, and an