Korean Legal Education for the Age of Professionalism: Suggestions for More Concerted Curricula

Abstract

Korea has ushered in a new era of legal education through a revolutionary change in its goals, institutions, and methodology. The goals of legal education are not to let as many students as possible pass the ever-competitive national bar examination by memorizing the substance of basic laws, but rather to ensure that students can think like lawyers. Rather than knowing in detail the substance of many particular laws, such students will possess more basic knowledge of the core of the Korean legal system. The main institutions for legal education in Korea are no longer the four-year colleges and the Judicial Research and Training Institute (“JRTI”), but chartered three-year graduate law schools. The methodology of legal education is not to subject students to one-sided lectures and urge them to memorize dogma, but to question the students about the facts and issues relating to specific situations and let them create legal solutions. However, the subject of curricula as a whole would determine the future of the Korean legal education system. This paper focuses on the following dichotomies: theory versus practice; mandatory versus optional; local versus global; and dispute resolution versus dispute prevention. This framework of dichotomies presents itself as the indicia of lawyers as professionals. “A professional lawyer is an expert in law pursuing a learned art in service to clients and in the spirit of public service and engaging in these pursuits as part of a common calling to promote justice and public good.” This paper argues that practical, elective, global, and dispute prevention education better foster the legal expertise necessary for helping clients as well as a firm commitment to the welfare of the larger community than does dogmatic, mandatory, local, and gun-for-hire education.