법조윤리 교육의 내용과 방법

With the introduction of law school system in Korea 2009 replacing the current undergraduate legal education, legal ethics has become one of the compulsory subjects to be delivered in every law school. Still there is little consensus among teachers of legal ethics with regard to the contents and method of teaching the subject. This paper aims to provide one of plausible ways of teaching legal ethics depending on some experiences and experiments by scholars in U.S. Concerning to the contents of legal ethics, this paper categorizes two kinds of approaches, namely, rule-oriented approach and value-oriented one. The former is the approach which emphasizes the importance of codified ethics rules and the role of disciplinary process in maintaining and improving the level of legal ethics among lawyers, whereas the latter approach is emphasizing the moral attitudes of the individual lawyers and accordingly the importance of the moral development by ethics-teaching rather than the threat of discipline. This paper shows the necessity of the latter approach by showing the deficiencies of the rule-oriented approach on the one hand and the possibility and merits of the value-oriented approach on the other. Concerning to the methods of implementing value-oriented ethics teaching, this paper shows the inevitability of individualistic approach, which makes ethics teaching unique in law school, by referring to the Socratic method and Kohlberg's experiment. Depending on several theories including the those of Piaget and Kohlberg, this paper proposes small-group discussion as a most recommendable way of improving students' morality in law school. In the ethically problematic environment which ethics professor has set up for the students with hypothetical cases, each student can well experience to face and overcome ethical dilemmas with his peer group. This kind of cooperation and moral discussion among peer group is the key to best result in the promotion of moral stage in Kohlbergian sense. This paper does not argue that we should wholly neglect or think little of codified ethics rules but instead alleges that we need more than teaching ethics rules. Only by upgrading the morality of individual law school students, we can justly expect the ethical legal profession in the future, which is the end of teaching legal ethics.