한국법원에 있어서 구술심리 강화와 사건관리방식의 변화

Under the previous civil procedure(“the deconcentrated parallel procedure”) system, Korean courts had a long-lasting tendency of making final decisions based on documents submitted by plaintiffs and defendants after repeating a number of perfunctory hearings at three or four-week intervals with little or slow progress. That practice could not reflect the civil procedure principle(“the principle of oral hearings”) that court decisions should be based on oral arguments made in courtrooms by plaintiffs and defendants. To eliminate the inefficiency of the previous practice and to reinforce the principle of oral hearings, Supreme Court of Korea introduce the ‘new case management method’ which was also called ‘new model’ from Mar. 1, 2001 and the new method was reflected in the new Civil Procedure Act which was implemented from July 1, 2002. Under the new case management system, courts were supposed to use the ‘concentrated hearing method’ holding just one or two hearings in most cases instead of the ‘deconcentrated parallel procedure’ or ‘split hearing method’ in the previous practice. As a way of having concentrated hearings in one or two occasions, the Act presumed a procedure where the preparatory pleading process precedes oral hearings. During the preparatory pleading process, both parties enter an offense and defense on allegations and evidence in writing in advance of oral hearings. But to put the preparatory pleading process before oral hearings resulted in unintended understanding and practice in many cases that entering offense and defense in documents is important and oral hearings are just a formality. To turn this wrong understanding and practice over to the originally intended reinforcement of the principle or oral hearings, the Court made continuous efforts to explain the meaning of the changed process. At last the Civil Procedure Act was amended again in 2008, and Art. 258 of the Act provides that the court, in principle, shall designate the date for the first oral hearing immediately. With the amendment of the provision, it became clear that civil procedure should be focused on oral hearings whereby offense and defense of parties should be made directly in front of judges in open courts.