법률가정치 연구-한국과 미국의 비교-

The purpose of this study is to analyze the mechanism of the lawyer’s politics in Korea through a comparative research with US’s case. After digesting the previous researches of the scholars in this field, the author defines the concept and boundary of lawyer’s politics. According to him, lawyer’s politics is a specific form of politics that functions in Liberal Democracy. Under the political slogan of ‘Rule of Law’ and the ideology of ‘Legalism’, the lawyers can occupy and even monopolize the judicial process and exclude the democratically elected representatives. And this is the reason why Liberal Democracy has a tendency to incline to the lawyer’s politics in long term perspective and the lawyer’s politics become the essential factor for the political stabilization of Liberal Democracy itself. This study tries to compare the reality of lawyer’s politics in Korean and USA in three fields; (1) the size and structure of legal profession (2) the participation in the process of legal protection of civil rights and collective action (3) the judicial reform discourses in the globalization trend. As a conclusion, the author contrasts the distinctiveness of the lawyers’ politics in each country. In Korea, it is the bureaucratic monopoly of judicial power that makes lawyers apolitical nobles of law. In US, the ideal of lawyer-statesmen is no longer valid because of the commercialization of legal profession. The new ideal of lawyer-merchant is now leading the globalization of law and legal profession, which becomes a real threat to Liberal Democracy in both countries.