변호사시험이 법학전문대학원의 교육에 미치는 영향

In Korea, new law school system was introduced in 2007 to overcome certain problems of the old judiciary examination system which was open to everyone but exceedingly competitive. This paper analyzes how the new bar exam (which was held six times thus far) affected the education of law school and reviews whether it is compatible with the original purposes of introducing law school in Korea. The new bar exam has been quite successful in selecting well-performing students, but requires students to memorize too much information on statutes and Korean Supreme Court cases. Moreover, it fails to test the ability to critically analyze and apply the cases but rather tests the ability to memorize and reproduce the holdings of the cases. As a response, the students use most of their study time to memorize statutes and the holdings of cases. Such phenomena are far from fulfilling the original purposes of the new law school system and would ultimately impair the students’ ability to practice law since the lawyers’ role in the future will be more about strategic advice, communication, and project management, rather than technical application of legal knowledge. Thus, this paper proposes to reduce the burden of bar exam in general, to reduce the number of court cases tested in the bar exam in particular (and produce a selected list of material cases to be tested), to maintain a broad pool of exam questions, to allow usage of laptop computer in the bar exam, and other practical ideas to improve the bar exam.