KOREA

The number of lawyers registered with the Korean Bar Association in 1957 totaled 1,099 Korean and 220 foreign nationals. At that time, the number of lawyers actually practicing was 364. The only foreign lawyers were American citizens and none of them practiced in Korea. [1] According to Seoul National University Bulletin, there are presently about 700 Korean lawyers practicing in the country. [2] There exist 26 law schools (15 law colleges and 11 law departments in public and private universities). [3] The collections of these law schools, however, are maintained by the main university libraries with an exception of Law College of Seoul National University where an independent Law Library is in operation. Two more independent law libraries worthy of mention are the Supreme Court Law Library and the Library of the Anglo-American Legal Center.

It should be noted that throughout the entire country there are about 290 libraries with a total collection of approximately 4,840,628 volumes where law books are usually kept under the heading of social science [4]


[1] Bopmu baekso [The White Paper of the Ministry of Justice], 1958, p. 34.
[2] Seoul National University Bulletin - Graduate School of Law, 1963-64.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Han'guk ch'ul p'an yongam, 1963, p. 220.

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Statistics on the number of legal materials including American law books in the university libraries, independent law libraries and general libraries are not available. However, the Publisher's Yearbook issued in 1963 reports that about 700 titles of law books (only the first edition) have been published since the country was liberalized from Japanese rule on August 15, 1945. [5]



[5] Ibid., 221-245.


Prepared by:

Sung Yoon Cho
Far Eastern Law Division
Law Library, Library of Congress

SYC:led

Transcribed and reviewed by contributors participating in the By The People project at crowd.loc.gov.