This volume is the first in a series of comparative studies that focuses on Korea's legal system and its political institutions under the sponsorship of the Korea Law Center at UC Berkeley Law School. Korea has experienced an astonishing pace of legal reforms within an interval of two generations. The collapse of the authoritarian regime started an irreversible process of democratization that has not yet completed its full course. The papers included in this volume cast new lights on the challenges and institutions that define the substance and the structure of current legal reforms. Although it is not the purpose of this volume to provide a comprehensive report on the current state of Korean law, the selective range of the themes is not a simple happenstance. It is representative of the current political debate which echoes the Korean society's determination to resolve the paradoxes of its legal tradition and overcome the trials of its democratic aspirations. 3
