New Korean law schoools

Korean Overseas Students Eyeing Law Schools at Home

Many Korean students overseas plan to return home to prepare for admissions to the new law schools that will open here in 2009. If they finish a three-year law school course, they will be entitled to take bar exams whose pass ratio is much higher than the current tests. Korean students in China are the most interested in the opening of the U.S.-style law schools here. Currently, 70 Korean students read law at Peking University. Sixteen of them will graduate in July 2008, and more than half of them have decided to prepare for admission to Korean law schools. If they stayed in China, they would have to apply for a graduate course or find a corporate job because the Chinese judicial system is not open to foreigners.
They hope that if Korea and China conclude a free trade agreement, demand for legal experts who know about both countries will explode. Much the same is true for Korean students at other prestigious Chinese universities, such as Renmin University and China University of Political Science and Law. Han (23), who is preparing to apply to an Ivy League law school in the U.S., cited the high cost as the first and foremost reason why the Korean students want to return home. "If you want to go back to Korea at all, you don't need to attend an American law school that costs tens of thousands of dollars per year,” Han said.

Kim (25), who is applying to the University of Tokyo Graduate School for Law and Politics, is also planning to prepare for a Korean law school. "I'd never have dreamed of becoming a lawyer in Korea so far due to the high barrier in the state-managed tests. But now, many Korean students are planning to return home to enter law schools in Korea." But undergraduate law majors in Korea still hesitate. Lee (24), a law junior at Seoul National University, said, "I've studied to prepare for the state exam. But I'm not sure whether I should change my plans to prepare for a law school."

There are a total of 97 universities across the country that maintain undergraduate law courses. They accept about 13,000 freshmen in total every year. The number of those preparing for the current state-managed bar exam is estimated at 25,000 to 30,000. If law school diplomas are regarded virtually as lawyer certificates, the number of takers of the LEET (legal education eligibility test) will be no less than 50,000, private tutoring institutes predicted.

[Law200]

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