Regular readers of this column may agree that, generally
speaking, Taiwan's judges are open to new legal theories bred
in other jurisdictions, especially when it comes to tech laws. A
recent example is the transplant of the "mosaic
theory."
First arising in a 2012 decision by the US Court of Appeals for
the D.C. Circuit (and later reviewed by the US Supreme Court under
the name United States v. Jones), the mosaic theory
renders a novel interpretation (but not without criticism) of the
Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution, as it "considers
whether a set of nonsearches aggregated together amount to a search
because their collection and subsequent analysis creates a
revealing mosaic." Orin S. Kerr, The Mosaic Theory of the
Fourth Amendment, 111 MICH. L. REV. 311, 320 (2012) (available
at: https://repository.law.umich.edu/mlr/vol111/iss3/1).
