비교헌법의 공용어(lingua franca)에 관한 비판적 고찰

In recent global comparative constitutional law scholarship, Korean constitutional law and its issues have received little attention, with language lying at the core of this phenomenon. Comparative constitutional analysis, which compares and analyzes constitutional texts and documents formed under diverse linguistic backgrounds, inevitably faces language barriers as inevitable obstacles. However, the technical and methodological challenges arising from linguistic differences in comparative law do not affect all researchers or nations equally. English works as a lingua franca in contemporary comparative constitutional law, thereby ensuring the efficiency of knowledge transmission and academic exchange, while simultaneously engendering fundamental epistemological problems, that is, epistemic bias and imbalance, in the field. Specifically, as English serves as the common language of comparative constitutional research, it goes beyond neutral communication to establish linguistic hegemony, whereby comparative constitutional scholarship and global constitutional discourse are predominantly led by Anglophone scholars and their doctrinal and academic preoccupations. This paper thus examines a long-overlooked issue in academia: the epistemological and structural problems generated by English’s role as a lingua franca in comparative constitutional law. It demonstrates how English distorts comparative constitutional knowledge, exacerbates epistemological errors, unjustly impacts on constitutional knowledge pool, and reinforces the dominance of Anglophone academic discourse alongside the marginalization of non-Anglophone jurisdictions. From a long-term, structural perspective, this constitutes epistemic injustice. By illuminating the implications of these issues within the Korean constitutional law context, as a non-Anglophone jurisdiction adopting monolingual system (Korean language) and bearing the legacy of colonial legal system and concepts, the paper proposes the necessity of strategies for the Korean constitutional scholarship to emerge as a meaningful participant in the ‘global constitutional gene pool’, thereby promoting epistemic justice in global comparative constitutional law.