초록 열기/닫기 버튼
Both Japan and Korea have been quite active on judicial reform in recent years. With respect to legal education, both countries have been taking substantial reform measures, modeling after the American law school system. Considering the prevailing attitude and culture of the legal profession between these two Asian countries and the United States, it is not surprising that a quite significant number of lawyers and legal scholars in Japan and Korea are sceptical about the new reform measures on legal education. Japanese launched the law school reform first, although Korea initiated such project a few more years earlier. Korea, now expecting to open the new law school in 2008, needs to carefully examine the on-going experiment in Japan. This paper is written to accomplish this purpose.In this paper, the author describes the initial process of the Japanese legal education reform, as well as the current situation after introducing the American style law school in 2004. While describing the major features of the reform measures, the authors highlights and discusses many points that seem quite relevant and educational to the Korean legal education reform. One of the basic premises of this paper is a strong belief in the free market system. The author argues that all the participants in the reform activities should not forget the principle of the judicial reform, which is providing better legal service to the public. Not this basic principle, but the self-serving group interest of the legal profession, however, has been prevailing in the Korean reform. The Korean Bar Association has been insisting on limiting the annual quota of new lawyers. The author tries to point out the fallacy of the argument, and suggests that any system that restricting healthy competition among law schools dooms to failure.
