리갈리즘에서 책임정치로 : 타락한 법치주의의 구원을 위한 시론

In the wake of the Korean Constitutional Court's decision to impeach President Yoon Suk Yeol on April 4, 2025, this article is an attempt to examine the problem of “legalism,” a decadent form of normative rule of law in Korean society. In order to analytically understand the political rise and fall of President Yoon Suk Yeol, who was a representative lawyer-politician of the time, it is necessary to take a view of legalism in relation to the evils of “reification of law” and “lawyer’s rule” that liberal democracy sometimes encounters. This article understands the concept of legalism as “an ideology that justifies all political issues as the best solution that is indispensable while making them a problem of law,” and then first of all, takes a close look at the unique constitutional political context represented in the problem of legalism in Korean society. And to the extent necessary for the analysis, the types of legalism are divided into the Sadducess’s and the Pharisees’ depending on the insights of the New Testament. The core of this article is to use the strengths and weaknesses of these two types of legalism to identify the context in which legalism has emerged in Korean politics after democratization, and to analyze the process in which a lawyer-politician Yoon Seok-yeol has been elected for president and impeached. Finally, I would like to briefly recall the institutional alternatives suggested in previous studies while finding the possibility of recovering the normative rule of law from the ‘responsible politics through law’ to escape from legalism. This article self-proclaims to seek the salvation of the corrupted ideal of rule of law in the direction from legalism toward responsible politics through law.