비특이성 질환의 역학적 인과관계론 - 국민건강보험공단 담배소송을 중심으로 -

Recently, considerable controversy has arisen over how to use epidemiological data when judging legal causation. This is because the precedent of the Korean Supreme Court is based on the dichotomy between specific and non-specific diseases established in the defoliant case. For non-specific diseases, the results of epidemiological investigations are regarded as simple reference data. The precedent was also used in the individual tobacco litigation filed by individual smokers with lung cancer. However, if the unit of the litigation party is a group other than an individual, couldn't the gap between the epidemiological causation targeting the population group and the legal causation targeting individuals be bridged? At first glance, the new lawsuit by the Korean National Health Insurance Corporation, which seems to claim damages from the population of lung cancer patients, brings this awareness to the fore. However, the recently sentenced trial rejected this logic by repeating the rules of the previous individual tobacco litigation. Against this background, this paper explores the following two points. First, we examine the reasons for applying the same rule as the previous tobacco litigation filed by individuals to the litigation filed by the Korean National Health Insurance Service. It has been recognized that there is an individual-centered mindset that legal liability should not be proportional or collective. Second, the legal theoretical basis supporting the dichotomy between specific and non-specific diseases proposed by the Supreme Court of Korea is examined by using the concept of remote harm. From this, we can find that epidemiological statistics function as a kind of information that reveals the process of non-specific diseases. So it is necessary to dualize the discipline for non-specific diseases whose process is revealed to a certain degree or not.