로스쿨 제도, 과연 도입할 만한가?― 전문성제고와 고비용 사이의 선택 ―

Abstract

In Korea law school system is widely supported as an alternative to the current legal education system, which is conducted in undergraduate level and under which only very few students become lawyers after passing bar examination. In this article I try to re-examine whether the law school system is the best alternative, especially compared with the reformed legal education in undergraduate level. The most important advantage of law school system is that it can produce the most highly specialized lawyers. It is based on the ground that under law school system students are qualified to learn from the highly specialized teaching and highly specialized professor can be produced only under the system. This kind of highly specialized teaching and learning can not be achieved in undergraduate level. But the law school system also has its own defects. The most serious one is the very expensive tuition fee, which may become a big barrier keeping the poor from entering law schools. If we insist that the chances of education should not be seriously deterred by the economic reason, it is not easy to dare to adopt law school system. If the government is willing to support the substantial part of expenses, the problem can be solved. But if not, the introduction of law school system will mean that only the rich can have access to the legal education and as a result to the legal resources. The problem is that the latter is more likely in reality. Here we have to choose between the highly specialized legal service which will be dominated by the rich and the rather less specialized legal service which will be provided with less money. I argue that as far as we support the law school system we should at the same time propose the way to overcome the economic barrier of the high tuition fee.