Courts in the Crossfire

Marie Seong-Hak Kim traces how Korea's courts went from criticized under authoritarian rule to a flashpoint over constitutional identity.
About this Event

Speaker: Marie Seong-Hak Kim, Legal Historian; Author of Constitutional Transition and the Travail of Judges: The Courts of South Korea
Moderator: Hetty Ye Jae Lee, Ph.D candidate in the Department of East Asian Cultures and Languages, Columbia University

Born in Seoul, Marie attended Ewha Womans University, where she was a reporter for the university newspaper. She obtained a Ph.D. in French history at the University of Minnesota and a J.D. at the University of Minnesota Law School, and was admitted to the Minnesota Bar. She was a professor at St. Cloud State University. Her primary research interests reside in comparative legal history. She is the author of Custom, Law and Monarchy: A Legal History of Early Modern France (Oxford University Press 2021) and Michel de L’Hôpital: The Vision of a Reformist Chancellor during the French Religious Wars (Truman State University Press 1997) in European history, as well as Constitutional Transition and the Travail of Judges: The Courts of South Korea (Cambridge University Press 2019) and Law and Custom in Korea: Comparative Legal History (Cambridge University Press 2012) in East Asian history. She translated Law and Custom in Korea into Korean as Kwansŭppŏp: Hanguk kŭnhyŏndaesa wa pigyopŏp yŏngu(Minsokwon 2025). She is also the editor of The Spirit of Korean Law: Korean Legal History in Context (Brill 2016). Most recently, she was a fellow of the Käte Hamburger Kolleg “Einheit & Vielfalt im Recht” at the University of Münster, Germany.

Marie Seong-Hak Kim will deliver her lecture on Tuesday, November 17 at 4:00 PM.

Modern Korean history has never had a dull moment. Cold War crises in the years after the Korean War not only resulted in the division of North and South Korea but also created profound fissures among South Koreans, giving rise to deep, ideologically tinged debate over politics and law. Central to this discussion is the evolving role of the courts, which took much fire for having failed to protect citizens' rights under the authoritarian governments in the 1970s and early 1980s. As the courts moved toward a more activist stance from the 1990s onward, they became targets in a proxy war fought between competing political forces over the country’s constitutional identity. More recently, the government has launched a series of reforms that have placed legal institutions under renewed pressure. A balanced and reasoned review of the history of courts in Korea can help us assess more accurately the country’s volatile political circumstances.