ALSA 2025 meeting

This study critically examines South Korea’s legal education and judicial appointment system from 2009 to 2025, analyzing structural changes, persistent challenges, and the unfulfilled promises of reform. Despite its ambition and scope, the reform has largely failed.
The introduction of the U.S.-style law school system in 2009 marked a turning point. While judicial reform discourse gained momentum during the civilian government of the mid-1990s—faster than in Japan—the actual changes were hastily legislated in 2007 after spanning three administrations. The Act on the Establishment and Management of Professional Law Schools restructured legal education and shifted judicial recruitment to a “unified legal profession” model.
Over the next sixteen years, the traditional bar exam was abolished and replaced. Although the new system aimed to select judges from experienced legal professionals, its implementation remains incomplete and contested. Meanwhile, two presidential impeachments and a major judicial corruption scandal exposed systemic weaknesses in judicial independence and accountability.
While the reformed system produced more lawyers and expanded access to legal services, it also intensified competition in the legal market. Divides persist between pre- and post-reform legal professionals. More critically, the reform precipitated the decline of academic legal education. The government-controlled bar exam pass rate dropped below 50%, pressuring law schools to focus curricula on exam preparation. Faculty hiring shifted toward practitioners lacking academic training, effectively transplanting the U.S. bar prep industry—or Korea’s Sillim-dong cramming culture—into graduate legal education.
This paper argues that the reform has undermined the scholarly foundations of Korean legal education while leaving core goals of judicial reform unmet.