로스쿨에서의 실무역량강화를 위한 커리큘럼(교육과정)의 개선과제

Abstract

Success of law school depends how well its curriculum is constructed to be suitable for educating excellent lawyers and how substantial the contents of education is. While the education period of law school is as short as 3 years, law school students relatively lack of law knowledge should be substantially taught jon training. Accordingly, there are many pessimistic views about whether the extensive education ranging from theories of law to job training can be well performed for such a short period. In addition, there are many criticisms that the current law school curriculum is not told to be formed to enable cultivation of practical competence because even the current laws and law school authorization standards provide for only 35 credits for required subjects. In the meantime, if educational affairs are not exactly administered at law school, a great issue may be caused resulting in loss of people’s reliability on law school graduate lawyers, as law school graduates can easily pass the examination for the bar whose competitive rate is very low. It seems that law schools have set up a variety of curricula for the 3 year period, but except for some specialized programs, 25 law schools operate almost same curricula. Required subjects of law school are given only 35 credits, and many important subjects such as Administrative Remedies Act, Injunctions in Tort Act, Police and Criminal Evidence Act, Civil Execution Act, various litigation practice subjects, etc. which are required to be necessarily taught to serve as a lawyer are classified as elective subjects at most law schools. Accordingly, it is real that not a few students graduate from law schools without completing even the subjects required for serving as a lawyer. In order to enable law school students to complete such important subjects, credits of required subjects shall be raised to more than 60 units, or the fundamental curriculum frame excessively allowing students self-control and elective subjects shall be wholly adjusted to enable law schools to introduce the required elective subjects system, even through mitigation of the current law school authorization standards. In addition, the current plan for intensifying administration of educational affairs focusing on the strict normative evaluation system shall not be mitigated without an alternative. The educational affairs administration of law school is required to be gradually mitigated only after introduction of a proven test system such as the common achievement evaluation test currently reviewed in Japan. In korea, it is recommended that the Law School Council administer an evaluation test to select flunkers for the first grade students to advance to the second grade, so as to keep the quality level of law school education and induce law school applicants to make enough preparation for law before entering law school. In the end, it will greatly contribute to advancement of law school education in the direction to step up practical competence. Finally, even though subjects are set up by individual law schools and teaching methods are different each other, it is recommended to set a minimal standard to be commonly satisfied at least for each of the subjects included in the examination for the bar.