Seoul National University School of Law has appointed a professor from the prosecution service, now reorganized as the Public Prosecution Office, to its criminal law faculty for the first time. The appointee is Lee Seung-joo, who handled investigations as well as personnel and budget affairs at frontline prosecutors' offices, including the financial and securities crime joint investigation unit at the Seoul Southern District Prosecutors' Office, and at the Ministry of Justice. The appointment is seen as an effort to bring prosecutorial field experience into legal research and teaching, and to widen the range of perspectives on criminal justice procedure.
In a recent interview with Seoul Economic Daily, Lee said the practices and viewpoints of prosecutors, who have served as one pillar of the criminal justice system, matter for interpreting the law correctly. "Legal scholarship can advance only when experience and perspectives from a variety of fields are reflected in it," the professor said.
It is the first time a criminal law professor with a prosecution background has been appointed at the law school, or at the university's former college of law. Earlier attempts to recruit professors from the prosecution service were made but some fell through amid controversy over prosecution reform, according to accounts of the process. Another reason cited for the appointment is the need to address the limits of law school education, which has focused on preparing students for the bar exam rather than on legal research.
"Criminal procedure runs from investigation to indictment, trial and the execution of sentences, and even under the revised Criminal Procedure Act, prosecutors are involved at every stage, through requests for supplementary investigation or applications for warrants," Lee said. "I will draw on my 14 years as a prosecutor to contribute to the development of legal scholarship and to training the next generation."
One of the professor's main research areas is negotiated settlements in criminal procedure. The best-known example is plea bargaining in the United States, under which a suspect or defendant receives a reduced sentence in exchange for admitting to an offense or cooperating with investigators. Lee argues that Korea should also debate adopting such a system to cope with increasingly sophisticated crime and the growing volume of digital evidence.
"Not only the United States but also Japan, Germany and France, whose legal systems are similar to ours, introduced negotiation systems tailored to their own criminal justice frameworks after the 2000s," Lee said. "In Korea, leniency is used for certain antitrust offenses, and some provisions have been written into law in connection with financial crime and special counsel legislation, but there has been little theoretical discussion." The professor added that as crime grows more sophisticated and digital evidence becomes vast, establishing the substantive truth is becoming increasingly difficult.
Lee also spoke about serving on secondment with the special counsel team investigating Kim Keon-hee. "I believe the provisions on reduction and exemption of punishment included in the special counsel act were of some help in the actual investigation," the professor said. "Because negotiating in secret creates side effects, writing negotiations into law, bringing them into the open and having their contents fully disclosed in court so they can be checked would resolve some of the concerns and side effects surrounding them."
Lee expressed concern about the overhaul of the criminal justice system that follows the reorganization of the prosecution service into the Public Prosecution Office. In particular, the professor said a system that bars prosecutors from conducting supplementary investigations directly and allows them only to request such work from the police could create friction and inefficiency between investigative agencies.
"I worry that cases will be bounced back and forth between agencies more often, and that the harm will fall on the people involved in those cases," Lee said. "Since considerable trial and error and confusion are expected in practice, teaching will also have to proceed while watching more closely how the revised Criminal Procedure Act is implemented."