독일과 우리나라의 헌법연구관제도에 관한 비교법적 연구 - 신속한 재판을 위한 헌법연구관제도의 효율적 운영방안을 중심으로 -

With the inundation of excessive cases, case processing by the Constitutional Court is continuously delayed. In order to deal with cases in a fair and timely manner, the Constitutional Court can seek ways to efficiently operate the judicial assistant system in charge of investigating and researching cases as a way to improve work on trials. The Federal Constitutional Court of Germany adopts a typical judge’s assistant model as a judicial assistant model. In contrast, the judicial assistant system of the Constitutional Court of Korea is based on the model where the judicial assistants assist the bench (bench assistant model). At the same time, the judicial assistant system of the Constitutional Court of Korea has elements of a judge’s assistant model in which each judge assigns a certain case to the judicial assistant to handle the case. By comparing the judicial assistant system of the two countries, the following suggestions can be made to efficiently operate the judicial assistant system in Korea. First, the current Constitutional Court of Korea has a significant number of judicial assistants who are unable to deal with cases due to dispatch work or concurrent work. This number should be reduced so that they can focus on case handling. Second, in order to make good use of the advantages of the elements of the judge’s assistant model, an improved system is needed where the constitutional court judge can continuously cooperate by building a relationship of trust with his/her judicial assistants for the duration of the judge’s term of office. Third, the research department organization in the Constitutional Court of Korea is divided into two departments to promote timeliness and professionalism in case handling. Judges should not arbitrarily assign cases to judicial assistants without considering the purpose of such a system. Fourth, in order to properly evaluate the workload of judicial assistants, it is necessary to consider the degree to which one judicial assistant in charge of the case of the full bench has handled the case that was referred to the full bench. It is not enough to know only the number of cases handled by each judicial assistant out of the total number of cases.