법무담당관 제도의 활성화와 과제

This paper analyzes the tasks for vitalizing the legal officer system from the perspective of seeking legal and policy directions for strengthening legal competency. Although administrative statutes are very complex and intertwined with legal issues, there have been a few cases in which national and local government officials have pushed forcibly without sufficient prior legal consultation and review in the process of policy making, decision making and enforcement. If public administration is not carried out in accordance with due process keeping pace with the request for international standardization of national administration and the need for settlement of legal administration and prevention of disputes, the state and local governments are subject to failures in administrative and national claims and huge fiscal burdens in result. The legal officer system refers to the organizational system in which public sectors such as state agencies and local governments are required to hire lawyers who will always provide legal advice on policy establishment, legislative drafting, etc. The introduction of such legal officer system was actively discussed by the Judicial System Reform Promotion Committee during the days of the Participatory Government, but it failed as a result of objections from government officials and failure in gaining public consensus. Based on such failure experience, it is necessary to prepare various conditions to introduce the new legal officer system that allows many lawyers to advance to public officials of central administrative agencies and local governments. However, it is not desirable to provide a lower rank to a legal officer, as in the legislation initiated by National Assembly member Kyung-Won Na. In addition, it is not considered as a right policy direction to introduce the legal officer system in a narrow sense in the form of providing an attorney directly to the position of open legal officer of a central or local government. Rather, in case of central administrative agencies, it is desirable to appoint one of the two policy advisers of the Minister as the legal adviser, and in case of regional governments, it is required to newly establish the Deputy Mayor of Justice or the Deputy Governor of Justice in parallel with the existing Deputy Mayor of Administration or the Deputy Governor of Administration. Furthermore, in order to strengthen the legal competency of administrative departments, the Act on Litigation with the State as a Party should be amended to improve the system in the way to designate qualified lawyers as litigation performers, and it is also required to amend the Administrative Procedures Act to improve the system so that only the employees of administrative agencies with lawyer qualifications or the external experts such as lawyers, etc. can become hearing officers. In future, the matter of vitalizing the legal officer administrative organization for strengthening legal capacity of the public sector should not be approached in the viewpoint of securing jobs for lawyers, but be promoted in the direction to benefit government officials too.