Changing History: Ideals and Realities of new Professional Law Schools in Korea

Japanese and Korean legal education systems are clearly in transition. They set ambitious goals to expand the core of legal profession, both in numbers and its capacity to cope with modern legal practice domestically and internationally. Yet, there are many obstacles to overcome. Based on low passage rate, new Japanese law schools have been criticized that they are in danger to become cram schools for bar examination preparation. To avoid this problem, Korean government has restricted the total number of students to 2,000 in only 25 professional law schools nationwide. Even if the government plans to higher the bar examination passage rate to 80% or higher, a severe competition among these 25 universities is foreseeable, such that new law schools would be under strong pressure to become cram schools for bar examination preparation. Behind the low passage rate of bar examination hides different goal of professional law school. Unlike US law schools, Japanese and Korean professional law schools seem to care less about educating legal professions in general terms. Their goal is to raise restricted numbers of only core legal professions like judges, prosecutors, and practicing attorneys. The translation difficulty of the English word “lawyer” into Japanese or Korean makes this conceptual difference even clearer. Educating wider legal professions like judicial scriveners, government legal officials, legal scholars and many others serving in legal branches in the society is likely to be excluded from the goal of professional law schools. This restricted view prevents Japan from increasing its passage rate of the new bar examination, and Korea from increasing number of students admitted to the new professional law schools. The legal education reform in Korea and Japan seems to be able to deal with many imperfections of the current NJE scheme effectively. Whether the reform’s implementation will produce intended results, however, remains to be seen.