Prof Lynette J. Chua wins Socio-Legal Article Prize 2025

For many of us, the thought of a parent suing their adult children for maintenance is antithetical to the idea of family—it seems the natural order of things for children to care for and support parents out of love. Yet this does happen, and children do fight back furiously under certain legal and political conditions. In showing this through her article on parental maintenance litigation in Taiwan, Professor Lynette Chua ’03, Vice Dean of Research at NUS Law, has won the Socio-Legal Article Prize 2025.

Titled “He Is Still Your Father”: Tetherings, Social Welfare, and Troubled Parental Maintenance Litigation in Taiwan”, the paper was recognised by the Socio-Legal Studies Association (SLSA), the UK’s most prominent association and one of the world’s leading associations in the field of socio-legal research.

This marks the second time Prof Chua has won this annual prize; the first was in 2016 for her work on the social mobilisation of human rights in Myanmar. SLSA’s Socio-Legal Article Prize recognises the most outstanding piece of socio-legal scholarship published in the 12 months up to 30 September of the preceding year.

In her award-winning article, Prof Chua examines the power of law through a theoretical concept she calls “tetherings”. Using this concept, she links individuals, their families and the state in a set of relational dynamics to elucidate how interactions among the parties shift their tripartite balance of power, exposing one or more of them to harm and change.

Prof Chua came up with this concept based on her ethnographic study of parental maintenance laws and litigation in Taiwan, which is part of a multi-jurisdiction, comparative research project that she has been conducting for almost 10 years. She carried out interviews with legal professionals and frontline personnel, litigants, and non-litigant, ordinary people; observed court hearings; and analysed media reports, court judgments, administrative decisions, as well as legislative and government records.

In Taiwan, the Civil Code requires adult children to provide for their parents if they cannot support themselves, restricting access to social welfare by holding their estranged children financially responsible. Parental maintenance litigation most frequently arises when nobody wants to look after their troublous parents—people who mistreated their children when they were young. However, starting from 2010, adults were allowed to argue for exemption of their maintenance obligation, on the condition that they provide evidence of their parents’ irresponsible behaviour in the past.

Consider the case of Wan Yi (pseudonym), who sued for an exemption from maintenance duty to her father who had suffered a stroke; he had beat her mother and left the family when she was a child. Required by Taiwanese law to pay for his medical expenses, Wan Yi had to empty her bank account to foot the hefty bill, and she was unwilling to continue paying for her troublous father’s care. Prof Chua finds that parental maintenance litigation in Taiwan both empowers and disempowers parent and child litigants in ways unintended by the law. It also increased administrative burden and financial costs for the government, raised political legitimacy concerns, and eventually triggered further legal reforms.

The concept of tetherings makes important contributions to sociolegal scholarship on disputing and continuing relations. Guided by this concept, Prof Chua’s article explains why and how state policies on welfare and legal enforcement of parental maintenance lead people in one of the most fundamental of relationships—that of parent and child—to sue each other. This finding challenges longstanding views in socio-legal studies that people who have or want to keep ongoing ties tend to avoid invoking the law against each other.

Additionally, the article advances feminist vulnerability theories by using rich empirical analysis to explain exactly how the state is also vulnerable (that is, not just parents or children) as the result of interactions with ordinary people. At the same time, it shows how frontline personnel compound the vulnerability of certain social groups when enforcing parental maintenance duty and implementing welfare criteria.

Besides these theoretical contributions, the article sheds light on laws and policies on ageing, and the relationship between social welfare and caring for the elderly. These issues are major concerns for many governments in Asia and around the world as their populations age rapidly and fertility rates drop.

“I feel extremely honoured by SLSA’s recognition. I am also grateful to NUS for its unwavering support of my research, as well as my colleagues at Law and other faculties for commenting on earlier drafts of the paper,” said Prof Chua. She is now writing a monograph based on the larger project, which was funded by an AcRF Tier II grant.