Searching for and suggesting the direction of law school education

Though it has been for fourteen years since law school started as a part of judicial reform, it has raised many concerns about the content and direction of education. Due to the excessive difficulty of passing the bar exam without becoming the qualification test of the bar exam, the specialization, internationalization, professionalization planned for originally have been retreated and its education is being provided with curriculum and educational contents centered on the bar exam. However, as a university affiliated institution, the law school has the responsibility to not only predict the future legal market and train lawyers, but also develop the jurisprudence. The legal market in the digital global era will demand the critical thinking and creative problem-solving skills rather than simple and repetitive tasks because of the development of legal technology such as AI and the easy access to the law information. One of the achievements since the establishment of the law school is the advance of the diversity of the legal profession. It is noteworthy that the number of corporate lawyers continues to grow, they have been expanding their scope. In complex legal disputes, deficiencies and gaps in the statutory law have been supplemented by precedents, which are ‘living laws’, for rational and valid dispute resolution in specific cases that cannot be resolved with mere legal text alone. This development of case theory raises the necessity of the case method in law education as well. It is not valid to point out that the socratic method is not appropriate in the educational one because it is a written law of Korean legal system, so it is suggested that the purpose of this method is thinking like a lawyer, that is, improving problemsolving ability through critical thinking. Law school should prepare improvement plans for improvement plans for practical curriculum, educational content, and educational methods responding to legal needs actively. Law schools demand for the lecture encompassing legal principles and legal theory as legal knowledge as well as even the arguments of precedents. Now that it is the law school's responsibility to prevent the retreat of the rule of law in Korean society and meet the demands of the legal service market, law schools should make an effort to establish it as an advanced system for nurturing lawyers through the reform of law school education.