일본에서 약관법의 민법전 신설 논의

Abstract

The reason why regulations of terms and conditions in “standard contract” are required is that the other party is hardly likely to review and negotiate them even though the operator party unilaterally writes the terms of the contract in advance. However, in spite of this need, Japan does not have a specialized law regulating the terms and conditions in standard contract up to now. Japan has just dealt with this as a matter of regulation of the Agreement clauses (provisions) by the Japanese Civil Code Article 90, and relatively recently, it has responded to this matter by enacting the “Consumer Contract law” in 2000 for establishing new rules in relation with regulation of contents of consumer contract. But Japan realized that these kinds of regulation would have limitations in itself and it suggested to establish several provisions to regulate the terms and conditions in standard contract in the Civil Code amendment, which was submitted to Parliament in March 2015. However, the process was never that simple, and the provisions finally prepared are also recessed a lot more than initially planned. That’s because interested industry opposed strongly to the introduction itself of new rules. This paper is aimed to present the implications for our laws by analyzing the provisions newly introduced into the proposed Civil Code of Japan and by deriving its features. For it, first of all, this article examines the process of discussion on the establishment of new rules for the standard contract and it analyzes the final provisions of the proposed Civil Code. Then this article will try to suggest implications that the discussion in Japan gives to Korean law.