법학전문대학원에서의 ‘법률문장론’ 수업에 관하여 - 실제 수업을 통하여 얻은 경험과 느낌을 중심으로

This article discusses what should be taught in the legal writing classroom of law schools. I taught the subject in the first semester of the year 2009, and many discussions in this article are based upon my own actual experience. There is no doubt that legal writing along with legal research should be considered as one of the most important, basic foundations for legal education at law school, and I tried to articulate why this is so in this article. The most basic task of a law practitioner being to analyze and give solutions to legal problems, the lawyer should be able to, not only find the relevant law first, and then apply the law to the given facts, but also accurately write all this law-finding and -applying process down on paper in a form and style that could be effectively communicated to other people. This legal writing ability is by all means one the basic skills that any law practitioner should be armed with, and in this regard I believe the subject is to be handled with more attention and enthusiasm at law school. In this regard, it appears to me advisable that a law school that takes the matter with a certain degree of seriousness should have at least one teacher who is exclusively devoted to the subject as well as well-trained assistants. Also, I do not believe it right that some of the Korean law schools, with regard to its legal writing class, focus on how to help students get used to the forms of such legal documents as court judgments, complaints, briefs, etc., which forms are already well fixed by courts or practitioners of older generations. I rather believe that the goal of legal writing education should be understood as enabling law students to grasp and master the basic style and structure of legal arguments, which should be firmly based upon, and rationally and flawlessly derived from, non other than the law, and not the lawyer's own prejudice or intuition.