KLRI : KOREA LEGISLATION RESEARCH INSTITUTE

Ⅰ. Background and Purpose of Research

▶ Criticisms of the current legal education system

○ Our current system for training legal professionals consists of two main pillars: the law school education and the bar examination. These two components were expected to secure diversity and specialization, and restore the centrality of education over examinations in the context of legal professional training.

○ However, there are now significant challenges about whether these expectations are being successfully satisfied. Criticisms persist that the current system is not producing the diverse and creative lawyers needed to solve newly emerging social problems.

○ Seventeen years after the introduction of the new system, it is time to re-evaluate whether our new system is working to effectively fulfill the original intent of the reforms.

▶ Normalization of Legal Education by Improving the Bar Exam

○ The way the Bar Exam is administered critically influences the direction and content of law school education. How the bar examination will be administered is a key issue.

○ This study examines whether the current bar examination aligns with the original purpose of introducing law schools. It also assesses whether the exam's method, question design, and evaluations are consistent with that purpose, and proposes necessary system improvements. With these efforts, we seek to contribute to the normalization of legal education.

 

Ⅱ. Contents

▶ Direction for System Improvement

○ Streamlining the Bar Examination

- The law school system was established based on the principle of training legal professionals through education. The bar examination should function as a tool to assess the fundamental knowledge and skills essential for these professionals. Consequently, the exam's structure and content should be more streamlined than its current form.

▶ Appropriate Scope and High-Quality Questions

○ The exam's scope should be appropriately defined.

- The exam should primarily focus on leading cases, and the inclusion of recent precedents should be restricted to those issued within the past one to one-and-a-half years.

○ Efforts must be made to secure high-quality questions that are in line with the purpose of the Bar Examination.

- During the question bank submission and examination development stages, all produced questions should undergo a rigorous review to confirm their suitability.

-Following the exam, a post-assessment of the questions' appropriateness should be conducted, with the findings used to inform future exams.

- We should also consider establishing a specialized body dedicated to question development. This body would focus on diversifying questions, improving their quality, and developing new types of questions.

▶ Abolishing Specialized Legal Subject Exams and Introducing a Credit System

○ Reforming the specialized legal subject exams should solve both the problem of general negligence and the over-concentration on specific subjects.

- Proposals that keep the existing exam format or combine it with a credit system are unlikely to meaningfully resolve the problem of over- concentration, as they do not address the unequal study volume across subjects.

- A credit system without specialized legal subject exams ensures a more balanced study volume by applying the same fixed semester course conditions to all subjects. Minor variations in workload can be managed by students without becoming a burden on bar exam preparation.

○The weaknesses of the credit system can be addressed with supplementary measures.

- While critics point to the difficulty of ensuring consistent educational quality across law schools and the lack of objective verification through an exam, these issues are resolvable. The former can be largely solved by standardizing the curriculum and evaluating law schools. The latter is justified by the necessity of first acquiring a foundation in basic legal subjects, and the opportunity to gain specialized knowledge and skills through coursework in school and practical training after graduation.

▶ Reduction of the Record-Based Exam

○ There is a significant overlap between the evaluation criteria of the record-based and case-based exams. To mitigate redundant study demands, it is necessary to consider a plan to reduce the scope of the record-based exam.

- One proposal is to eliminate the public law portion of the record-based exam due to its limited practical utility and its overlap with the case-based exam. This would allow the record-based assessment to focus more on civil and criminal law.

- An alternative proposal is to abolish the constitutional law record-based exam, where the practice of drafting litigation documents by lawyers is relatively infrequent. This approach would retain the administrative law exam while halving the score weight of the criminal law record-based exam.

▶ Enhancing the Practicality of the Case-Based Exam

○ To make the case-based exam more practically relevant, questions should be designed to assess the knowledge and skills that lawyers use most often in their practice.

-While an issue-extraction format would be more appropriate for assessing a student's ability to identify valid legal issues from a factual background, a blended approach that includes a reasonable proportion of issue-presented questions is more practical for ensuring grading objectivity.

○ There is no particular need to adhere to an integrated question-setting method.

▶ Reduction of the Multiple-Choice Exam

○ The multiple-choice exam should be kept for its benefits in fair grading and assessing foundational knowledge. However, its primary purpose should be to verify basic legal knowledge and competencies, which is in line with the law school's goal of training legal professionals through education.

- To streamline the exam, it is advisable to abolish the multiple-choice sections for administrative law, commercial law, civil procedure, and criminal procedure, which were not part of the previous judicial exam. The maximum scores for constitutional law, civil law, and criminal law would then be set at 50, 75, and 50 points, respectively.

- For the multiple-choice exam, we should consider several key reforms: transitioning from a five-choice to a four-choice format, publishing a question bank to reinforce its role in measuring basic knowledge, and separating it from the essay-style exam. This approach would involve linking a certain percentage of the exam questions to the question bank and reusing some past questions.

▶ Streamlining the Professional Responsibility Examination

○ To streamline the professional responsibility exam, a question bank should be published, from which a specific percentage of the exam questions will be designed.

   

Ⅲ. Expected Effects

▶ Contribution to the Improvement of the Bar Examination System

○ This study's proposed reforms can be applied to improve and rationalize the bar examination.

▶ Contribution to the Reform of Bar Examination Laws and Regulations 

○ The results of this study provide a basis for reforming and updating the legal framework of the bar examination.

▶ Contributing to Training Specialized and Creative Legal Professionals

○ By rationalizing the Bar Examination to normalize law school education, this study will contribute to the development of specialized and creative legal professionals.