미국의 상사법 교육의 현황과 시사점

Abstract

The US law professors use various teaching methods for commercial law and corporations law classes. They tend to use traditional case-socratic method for first year courses and other basic courses. Problem method,seminar type of classes are used for upper-level classes. Legal Clinic is also an important way of providing practical experience to the students. Korean legal system can find its origin in the civil law system, where statutes and codes come before the cases, and the cases do not have binding force of law. Therefore using traditional case-socratic method as in the US for Korean law school subjects may not be appropriate. Instead, it will be helpful to use both statutes and cases in the class. Problem method seems to be a good way to provide Korean law school students opportunities to apply the learned legal principles to real-world situations. However it will require the professors’ as well as the students’ much time and preparation in order to make the class discussions meaningful. Practical seminar and academic seminar also seem to be good ways of teaching Korean law school students. Although the US legal education is mainly geared at raising legal practitioners, law schools also focus on producing legal scholars. In that regard, most US law schools have writing requirements for the students to graduate. It usually includes first year wiring requirement and upper-class writing requirement. Students generally satisfy the upper-class wiring requirement by submitting a 25∼50 page thesis paper through an academic seminar, or under supervision of a faculty member. Korean legal education is currently carried out in undergraduate and graduate law colleges and newly established law schools. It seems that graduate law colleges take academic approach to raise legal scholars, and law schools take practical approach to raise legal practitioners. Korean graduate law colleges may be able to find some ideas of training their students from the US law school’s academic approach focusing on writing requirements.