법률교육과 법률가 충원 제도의 글로벌 스탠더드 - 법조인의 전문화 및 국제경쟁력 강화의 전제 조건으로서 -

Under the current system, admittance to legal profession is determined solely by state-administered examinations. This system has undermined the legal education. Passing the bar-examination has become the all important aim of legal education. Given that, in each year, there are more people wishing to enter into legal profession than the sensible number of new lawyers, one cannot do away with a reasonable selection mechanism. However, the present system is premised upon a dogma that state examinations are the only workable selection mechanism. The assessments which took place in the course of several years of legal education are completely dismissed as unreliable. The over-emphasis on state examinations has produced lawyers with parochial outlook. There is little room for curricula which could promote the values and skills needed in an international legal market. In order to have a diversified curricula designed to equip students with the skills necessary in today’s globalised legal market, there is a need for a fundamental reform of the structure of the current system. While everything depends on state examinations, it is to no avail to propose a curriculum which is not immediately relevant to passing of the state examinations. No matter how hard one may attempt to offer a wide ranging curricula to train the essential skills required in international legal practice, the effort will not prove to be viable as students will focus only on the subjects which are tested in the state examinations. Under these curcumstances, the first meaningful step to implement a reform is to introduce a quality assurance mechanism for legal education. If a proper system of external examination is put in place, the reliability of law schools’ assessments will be enhanced considerably. When one can trust the schools’ assessments, one has less need to rely on state examinations. Provided that the reliability of law schools’ assessments is improved in this manner, it is proposed that only those graduates whose grade is C or lower should be required to sit for the state examinations. One may propose various ways to promote skills necessary for international legal practice, such as offering more courses taught in English, exchange programs with foreign law schools or internship programs in foreign law firms. But none of these proposals would have any prospect of success under the current system where passing the state examinations is the only means of entering into legal profession. Only when students as well as the law schools are liberated from the state examinations can they genuinely invest in a variety of creative curricula which may be useful to train international legal practioners.