식민지 조선의 법조 양성: 법조 자격 및 시험제도를 중심으로

This paper examines the legal profession qualification system in Korea under Japanese colonial rule, which constitutes an important part of the history of the Korean legal profession qualification system undergoing a great change with the introduction of the law school system in 2009. After Meiji Restoration in 1868, the legal profession qualification system in imperial Japan was created under the initiative of ‘the state’. And it converged into the examination and training system strictly controled by ‘the state’. It converged into the ‘national legal profession examination’ in 1923, which blocked the intervention from the attorneys and universities, while in the early stage the attorney qualification system had had a relative autonomy, and the legal profession qualification had been linked to the education at the universities through ‘the exception for the graduates of imperial universities’. The legal profession qualification system in Korea under Japanese colonial rule was on the one hand connected to that of imperial Japan, and on the other hand involved the special institutions which were not introduced in imperial Japan. It shared the characteristic of ‘the initiative and control of the state’ with that of imperial Japan, and the characteristic was strengthened by the special institutions in colonial Korea. Adjusting themselves to the ‘given reality’, the brilliant minds in colonial Korea turned into ‘extremely few elites’, through the ‘extremely difficult examination’. These characteristics in colonial Korea show the original form of the characteristics of the legal profession qualification system in Korea after the ‘liberation’ in 1945, i.e. ‘the initiative and control of the state’ and ‘the myth of the examination’.