어음·手票法 判例의 變化와 展望

Abstract

The Bills of Exchange and Promissory Notes Act and the Check Act of Korea, whose enactment will be nearly 50 years, have simultaneously the nature of technical law as well as imperative law. However, neither those acts have many regulations comparable to other laws, nor have any accumulated transcendental legal principle, and thus the dispute occurring from the transaction of promissory notes and checks and the confusion over law interpretation could not be avoided. In the process of reasoning the reasonable legal principle for solving the dispute over laws of complicate transaction of promissory notes and checks like this, the importance of the Korean Supreme Court Judgments executing the importance of theory and the performance of judge-made law has been more emphasized. As a result of it, the number of judicial judgments relating to the promissory notes and checks is extraordinarily more than that of other areas of the commercial law. We can see that the judicial judgments over the promissory notes and checks in the latest Korean Supreme Court Judgments have been decreased in quality as well as in number. We may appraise that this is because of the decrease of settlement rate by the promissory notes and checks together with the epochal change such as the enforcement of the Electronic Promissory Notes Act in 2005, and because the settlement of the reasonable judicial principle of the promissory notes and checks through the analysis of accumulated judicial judgments. In the meantime, even if the use of real promissory notes is being sharply decreased due to the continuous increase of the use of electronic promissory notes by the enforcement of the Electronic Promissory Notes Act, the electronic promissory notes are still governed by the existing the Bills of Exchange and Promissory Notes Act and its legal principle, except that the technical problem whose material has been changed from paper to electronics. Considering the fact that the real promissory notes are being still used, the Korean Supreme Court Judgments will display the function as the judge-made law for quite a long period in the future. Therefore, with this essay, I would like to retrospect the process of change of the Korean Supreme Court Judgments over the promissory notes and checks until now, and to sort the judgments which can be the standard for the reasonable interpretation of the Bills of Exchange and Promissory Notes Act and the Check Act, and to present the outline of the case together with the point of the judgment, and then to add a brief explanation with the least opinion of the writer.