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Law and Justice in Korea: South and North, by Chongko Choi. Seoul: Seoul National University Press, 2005. x, 533 pp. Illustrations, bibliography, index. $30.00 cloth.
Korea's legal tradition, like others in East Asia, remains poorly understood by modern comparative lawyers outside the region. In taxonomies of legal systems, Korea is usually treated as a variant of the Chinese or Japanese tradition, or alternatively as a pure transplant from Western law, with little original to offer in terms of doctrine or theory. In this volume, Chongko Choi, a prolific and wideranging legal scholar at Seoul National University, provides an important corrective by drawing attention to Korea's distinctive legal history.
The volume consists of Choi's collected English-language papers on legal history and jurisprudence. While it is not designed to be a comprehensive overview of the topic, Choi's wide interests cover significant ground, including such diverse topics as an examination of the imagery of the Japanese and Korean supreme court buildings, a comparison of North and South Korean constitutions, and an account of the treatment of Korea by leading comparative lawyers in the West. The heart of the book is a temporally organized series of essays on traditional Korean law, modernization, and the contemporary legal system. Choi makes a number of interesting and effective moves, such as tracing Korean constitutional...