This Study aims to analyze foreigners' awareness of Korean legal cultures during the late Chosŏn period. Legal cultures refer to regular patterns of behavior shared by the members of society in relation to law. It is a concept encompassing the legal ...
This Study aims to analyze foreigners' awareness of Korean legal cultures during the late Chosŏn period. Legal cultures refer to regular patterns of behavior shared by the members of society in relation to law. It is a concept encompassing the legal system, legal procedure, legal custom, and the legal perception. So understanding the legal cultures helps clarify the actual legal situation in a society. This Study examines the foreigners' perceptions of the actual legal situation of the time by focusing on the records of Homer Hulbert and Robert Moose who resided in Chosŏn for a long time and learned Chosŏn society by experience. It also tries to grasp the context behind their perceptions in order to conduct a multifaceted analysis.
Korean legal cultures during the late Chosŏn period assume transitional aspects because the traditional law and the modern western law were mixed and adopted at the same time. Foreigners who experienced the legal cultures mainly paid attention to the execution of trials and punishments. Most of them considered them negatively.
Their perceptions were expressed by pointing out the premodern features and corruption of Korean legal cultures. As Hulbert stayed in the capital and Moose stayed in regions, there were different evaluations on trial procedures between the areas in terms of the advancement of modernity. The differences were not significant, though. Whether in the capital or regions, the negative awareness of trial procedures was found. There was no foreigners' positive awareness of legal cultures. It is clear that their perceptions were based on the negative aspects of the actual legal situation.
There are two reasons why foreigners' perceptions were so biased. First of all, most of the foreigners recognized the wrongful interaction between law and politics such as the law abused as a tool for political corruption. Second, they did not consider the formation of the unstable legal cultures resulting from the heteronomous and radical introduction of the modern western law at an early stage.
In the process of analyzing the foreigners' perception, meanwhile, the actual state of Chosŏn legal cultures was revealed as well. The detailed information on specific applications of law, its enactment, and the members of society under it is found, which is missing in Korean materials. The foreigners' awareness, as a third view which differs from ours, provides us with the new factual information and enables us to recognize the parts which we could not grasp before. Although their awareness highlights mostly the negative aspects, it can be accepted as a part of understanding Korean legal cultures once it is verified by being cross-examined with Korean materials.