우리나라 법학방법론의 전개

Legal Methods provide legal practitioners, legal scholars and law students with a integrated tools for interpretation and application of law. Nowadays legal methods deal not only with the traditional foundations of legal reasoning but also with logico-philosophical theories of law, including legal hermeneutics, legal semantics, topical jurisprudence. Modern legal methods, besides, include legal economics, CLS, feminist and post-modernistic legal theories etc. Nevertheless, the legal method remained just one of main spheres of legal philosophy till now. But it is about to set up as a new branch of general jurisprudence. Modern legal methods as well as traditional legal methods were unnoticed by legal scholars and legal practitioners for a long time in Korea. Only a few legal scholars had interests in legal methods, but regarded it as a trivial matter of jurisprudence. After so long a time some academic scholars devoted their attention to traditional legal method around methods of commentary on precedents in 1990s. In addition, the legal method has made rapid progress by discussing modern legal methods. It was the Renaissance of legal methods in Korea. Henceforth, the legal method has established its significance in legal philosophy during 2000s. At some risk of over-simplification, the brief history of legal methods in Korea is as follows: from a wasteland of legal methods to a main field of legal philosophy through reclaimed period, take-off period, specialization period, and period of Renaissance. Legal scholars majored in dogmatics of main field of law want understanding of legal methods. Needless to say, legal practitioner are the same. All possible efforts to make legal methods available for legal scholars and legal practitioners should be exerted in the Era of Law School that places great emphasis on practice-oriented jurisprudence.