로스쿨과 법학의 발전

Abstract

After one year's work, October 4th 2004 Judicial Reform Committee produced its final report on judicial reform in Korea, which proposed law school system as a new legal education system. This article tries to critically evaluate its proposal of law school system, focusing on the new system's effect on jurisprudence(legal discipline) in Korea. As there are many ambiguous points in the proposal, I analyze it in two ways. Firstly, I show what will happen in law school system when we restrict the number of the student under 1200. In this case I argue that we will face the worst situation in legal discipline and legal education system. Most obviously our jurisprudence will be totally devastated. Secondly, I show what will happen when the competition between students, professors and law schools with more than 2000 students. In this case also, we cannot obtain what we expect from the new law school system. The law schools will be busy preparing the students for the examination, which will result in very difficult situation: hampering the legal specialization among students and law schools, depending too much on the cases of the Supreme Court, losing critical legal education and keeping the poor away from legal education. Additionally I showed that the law school system cannot provide internationally competitive legal services in the globalization age. As an alternative, I propose the abolishment of the current bar examination, which means rapid growth of the number of the lawyers in Korea through proper legal education. For the small number of lawyers itself is the biggest obstacle to proper jurisprudence and legal education as well as legal specialization and the high prices of legal service.