상법총칙·상행위법 개정안의 주요쟁점

In order to modernize the Commercial Code in Korea, the Ministry of Justice in Korea organized “the Special Committee for Amendment on Commercial Code” (hereinafter “the Committee”) in February 2008. The aim of the Committee is to propose to revise some statutes in the Commercial Transaction Part in the General Provision of the Commercial Code. The proposed revision of the Commercial Code takes into account recent changes in various business environments as well as newly created and developed commercial transactions such as commercial broadcasting and electronic transactions that are not defined in the existing Commercial Code. In addition, the revised Commercial Code is to stipulate legal relationships between parties in transactions in order to solve uncertain legal problems arising in new commercial transactions such as lease, franchise, and factoring. As such, the revised Commercial Code will make great contribution to improve the legal certainty in these new commercial transactions. Since the existing Commercial Code uses many Japanese legal jargons that are far from being understandable among lay people in Korea, another purpose of establishing the Committee is tore write the Commercial Code in plain Korean vocabularies. Furthermore, through the revised Commercial Code, global standards in business and economy will be more enhanced in Korea. Nonetheless, the revision of the Commercial Code has not been systematically achieved to date. Rather, only a small number of statutes in the existing Commercial Code that do not reflect current business environments at all have been proposed to be revised. It is recommended that in the next revision, the Commercial Code should take into full consideration current practices in commercial transactions at the time. Besides, the Commercial Code should be more modernized in terms of legal vocabularies in statues since the existing Commercial Code is tainted with old-fashioned legal terminologies, which have confused the public.