變化하는 法曹의 世界 ― 韓國의 經驗을 중심으로 ―

Abstract

Korean society has been tremendously transformed from a war-torn, predominantly agricultural state up to the 1960s into an industrialized and globalized information society today. The Korean legal profession has undergone transformation as well for the last few decades. The per capita national income was around $100 and 60% of the population was in the agricultural sector in the 1960s, but their figures are respectively around $10,000 and 10% in the 1990s and in the 2000s. There were around 400 to 700 practising lawyers against the population of around 25 millions in the 1960s, but their number now reached around 5,500 against the population of around 45 millions in the 2000s. The prevailed patterns of practice that had ruled the legal profession up to the mid-1980s were: once you passed the bar examination, you go to the compulsory course for a lawyer at the government-run Judicial Research and Training Institute (JRTI) for two years and then to practice after having acquired a few years of practical experiences as a career judge or public prosecutor (a governmental lawyer); solo practice was the norm; and their orientation was litigation in typical civil and criminal cases. Now there have emerged diversifications of practice such as emergence of legal specialists in other areas of law (such as corporation, security, tax, environment, patent, and anti-trust law) than ordinary civil and criminal law, blossoming of law firms and in-house counsels, drafting and counselling along with advocacy, playing of a policy- making role, and practice without a prior practical experience as a governmental lawyer immediately after their education and training at the JRTI. In a large measure, the transformation of the legal profession has been brought more by the social changes than the other around. And the former change has usually been lagging behind the latter one. Yet university legal education is still not the requirement for the bar examination so that those whose university major is not law and who has even no university degree can take the examination. Thus, the wisdom of the present legal education and training institution has been questioned about whether it is adequate enough to train lawyers needed to service the contemporary globalized complex society, for example, to train legal specialists, and whether the present annual quota of those 1,000 who pass the bar examination is of the right size. Naturally the idea of introducing law school has been seriously debated in Korea. For the present legal education and training institution has been found deficient in producing such lawyers as expected in the contemporary globalized complex society.