법조윤리, 무엇을 어떻게 가르칠 것인가?

This essay deals with a part of Law School Education. The Law School Act of 2007 has opened a huge possibility to transform Korean judicial system, because it changed the method and procedure of training and recruiting lawyers. This act has introduced to Korean society a kind of American style law school system, which will cause not only conceptual but practical change of Korean lawyers system: from that of law bureaucrats to the system of legal profession. Social demands for education of legal ethics stems from that change. There are so many reasons that legal professions are controlled by ethical norms and by strong body to execute those norms, to keep them from corrupting and spoiling the legal system for their own interests at the sacrifice of public interests. Unfortunately, however, there has been accumulated so few research products on such subjects in Korea, that teaching legal ethics will confront with big troubles because of lack of textbook and materials, with which “Korean” legal ethics can be taught. This essay points out that we, korean law professors and lawyers have so much pressing matters to accumulate and analysis lots of cases and materials and research products to publish an “uniform” textbook of legal ethics. For these jobs, this essay suggest 17 themes, which must be dealt in legal ethics class; conceptions of legal profession and their corresponding ethical demands, rationales and concepts of legal ethics, relationship of clients and lawyers, conflict of interests, ethics of in-house counsels and so on. Developing appropriate methods of education and training is another problem of Korean law school. this essay poses only one suggestion, however: warning against the so-called socratic method as education method of legal ethics. Because there is a few theories and practices on regulation the legal professions in Korea, socratic method can make never-negligible dangers in legal ethics class: It may let students fall in confusions of concepts and disorganization of logics rather than make students scrutinize on the meaning of legal ethics.