공법이론과 공공정책 (I) -공법이론 연구방법론으로서 공공선택이론-

This paper is an introductory part of my pioneering research scheme of analysing the overall public law theory in the perspective of public choice theory. In traditional dogmatic public law theory, the existence of transcendental public interest was taken for granted and the people acting in public arena were assumed to have that public interest as their primary goal to achieve. In contrast to the traditional public law theory, public choice theory takes the assumption of self-interested public agents and methodological individualism, which makes the economic analysis of public law theory to be possible. The main efforts of the public choice theory were placed on finding the social preference function of a society to collect the individuals’ preferences to the goal of social preference,which is actually no different from the endeavors to find public interest in public law deliberations. In this paper, I tried to find the role and possibility of public choice theory as a new analytical tool for public law theory by explaining the conceptual framework of public choice theory and the detailed contents of the Arrow’s impossibility theorem. I sincerely hope the research in this paper could provide a new foundation for the analysis of the process of judicial review in the perspective of public choice theory, which is expected to enable the construction of new scheme of the overall public law theory in Korea.