The Current Situation and Tasks of Civil Procedure Education in Law Schools: Upon the 10th Anniversary of the Law School System

Abstract

Ten years have passed since the law school system was launched in 2009. Introduction of the law school system was motivated by problems of the past Judicial Examination: distortion in distribution of human resources, devastation of legal education in universities and insufficient expertise and diversity of graduates from Judicial Research and Training Institute. The biggest challenge to the law school system was the argument that the Judicial Examination should continue to exist as a source of lawyers. But the challenge was cleared when the Constitutional Court dismissed petitions based on the argument in 2016. This article purports to find out impact of the law school system on legal education with focus given on civil procedure and to evaluate whether the law school system is achieving its intended goals. Overall the law school system aimed to achieve expertise, diversity and international sense of lawyers. It is general opinion that the law school system is achieving its goal of diversity, but not so successful with regard to other goals. Symbolically, the world of legal education is under high pressure and fragmented. Law schools are suffering from huge amount of deficit. Professors are bearing heavier teaching/scoring burdens. Students are having hard time due to unreasonably harsh competitiveness. Schools, teachers, students and lawyers disagree with each other when they analyze reasons and suggest solutions. This article summarizes results of the survey implemented by the Korean Association of the Law of Civil Procedure in October 2018, to show current shape of legal education of civil procedure. Finally, this article sets out suggestions to cope with current problems. It is wise to focus on those problems, for which curing measures can be devised within the world of law school for now, because problems such as integration of lawyers and pseudo legal professionals need negotiations or sometimes fierce battles with other areas. Within the world of legal education, priority should be given to interests of students, who are the weakest, which will help make up consensus. As for method of teaching civil procedure, methods taken by the U.S. law schools like socratic method and case analysis have drawn much attention. Although our law school system is modeled after that of the U.S., even now there are many different and sometimes contradicting versions regarding what the U.S. law schools are actually doing. It is wise not to take dichotomy approach.