Episode 28

On the screen was a past midterm exam question from the Constitutional Law I course, which I had seen before.

[Question 1. Compare and contrast at least two legislative examples of basic rights in Korea and Germany from a comparative legal perspective, and critique the following Constitutional Court precedent. (200 points)]

"Everyone, what do you think when you see this?"

I asked, and Lee Ha-roo pretended to vomit.

"Ugh. I'd rather choose death."

"Honestly, I don't know what they want us to do."

Yoo Tae-woon also gave a bitter smile.

"Of course, the Constitutional Complaint is mentioned in the professor's lecture notes. It's buried in some inconspicuous corner, though. At this rate, it feels like we wouldn't have enough time even if we memorized the entire several-hundred-page lecture notes."

"Hmm, that's a valid point."

I nodded.

The Constitutional Court professor's lecture notes had no distinction between important and unimportant content.

Once, someone had asked why, and the answer he'd given was something like, 'There's nothing unimportant in what I teach.'

Because of that, no one could know how things would be linked together and appear on the exam.

If that was the case, we would have to memorize the several-hundred-page lecture notes, word for word.

"But as everyone knows, we can't do that."

What subject takes up the most time in law school studies?

It's Civil Law.

The reason is simple.

Most legal disputes that occur in this country are civil cases that boil down to 'that guy isn't giving me the money he owes.'

There are many disputes, so there are many precedents, and because there are many precedents, there are many things to memorize and analyze.

Next, in terms of volume, is Criminal Law.

The world is always full of people committing crimes and getting caught.

On the other hand, Constitutional Law and Administrative Law didn't have that much weight in exam-focused legal studies.

From the perspective of a test-taker, time is a limited resource.

Naturally, you have to spend a lot of time on things that are heavily weighted, and then deal with the rest with whatever time is left.

That meant there wasn't enough leeway to overinvest in Constitutional Law.

"It would be nice if we could at least predict the exam trends."

Han Seol pointed out the problem.

"Then, we could just focus on those points and prepare, which would greatly reduce the burden."

That was true.

The biggest difficulty with the Constitutional Court professor's exams was precisely that.

Even if the scope of an exam was vast, if you could predict what parts would be tested, it was possible to reduce the effort that went into preparation.

'For example, like me, focusing on the main issues of the bar exam when reviewing.'

But there was no trend to the Constitutional Court professor's exams.

The bar exam? Past judicial exams? His style was light-years away from those kinds of things.

You couldn't even tell what standard he used to cut down on content or adjust the emphasis.

In the end, most students couldn't properly prepare for the Constitutional Court professor's exams and ended up giving up.

They would just barely finish one review and then rely on their memory and luck to write fiction.

It was also a given that the Constitutional Court professor would get angry every year, saying that the students' answers were a mess.

The study group members, who shared the sense of the problem, sighed deeply.

"...But you know,"

Seeing that, I smiled brightly.

"Is there really no trend? "

Everyone was surprised and raised their heads.

"Huh?"

"Wh, what do you mean by that?"

"Think about it. What does the 'exam trend' actually mean?"

Any exam is ultimately created and administered by a specific individual or group.

So, what do they want to test on the exam?

"Of course, they'll test what they 'want to test.'"

The essence of exam preparation is to understand that.

The reason why we focus on the past issues when studying for national exams is not for any other reason.

It’s because the test makers want to test that, so we prepare because there's a high chance it will appear.

If that was the case, then we had to think that the Constitutional Court professor's exam was fundamentally the same.

"If we can just read the subjective standards of what this esteemed scholar considers important, we can predict the exam questions."

"...Is that possible?"

"Of course, it's possible."

I operated the laptop.

The video projected on the wall changed to a legal information database site that any law school student would know, and the Korea University library homepage.

"...Why the library all of a sudden?"

Han Seol asked.

"There's a way to read those standards here. Now, what were the keywords for the previous exam? Constitutional Complaint. History. Comparative Law."

I said that as I typed the same keywords into the search bar and pressed enter.

Then.

[Han Il-gu, Historical Development of the Constitutional Complaint - Focusing on its Comparative Legal Examination-]

One thesis appeared on the screen.

"...This is!"

Yoo Tae-woon's jaw dropped.

"Han Il-gu? Is this a thesis written by the Constitutional Court professor?"

Han Seol asked. Han Il-gu was the Constitutional Court professor's real name.

"That's right."

I nodded.

The same content as the exam questions the Constitutional Court professor had set was written in the thesis he had written himself.

What did that mean?

"No way."

Han Seol's eyes widened.

"He tests on the topics he's researched...?"

"That's right."

It wasn't just a simple coincidence.

If there was an exam question about the right to hold public office, you could find a jurisprudential review titled 'A Critique of the Constitutional Court Precedents on the Scope of Protection of the Right to Hold Public Office'.

If there was a question mentioning Schmitt's constitutional theory, there was a thesis titled 'Analysis of the Yushin Constitution - Focusing on Carl Schmitt's Theory of Sovereign Dictatorship'.

If it wasn't in the library search, related writings could be found in the legal information database.

If it wasn't in the legal information database, a review posted on some website would pop up when you Googled it.

In the end, there was a corresponding academic work by the Constitutional Court professor for every past exam question.

At this point, I could say it with conviction.

"The Constitutional Court professor, Han Il-gu, tests on the content he has covered in his writings."

I clapped my hands to draw their attention.

"In other words, if we examine Han Il-gu's writings, we can reverse-engineer what will be on the exam."

No matter how much of a stickler the Constitutional Court professor was, he couldn't set exam questions with concepts that weren't even in the scope of the exam.

So, if we extracted the concepts and keywords that fell within the scope of the midterm exam and searched for the corresponding materials in the law library, the exam questions would definitely be drawn from those.

To get a good score, you had to read the theses and articles written by the Constitutional Court professor, rather than the lecture notes.

"As expected, Mr. Park Yoo-seung! You've found a method!"

Yoo Ye-seul made a fuss and fawned over me.

She was like a new employee giving a desperate reaction to the team leader's joke.

How did this person end up like this?

However, the other study group members' expressions were still dark for some reason.

"Um... Yoo-seung?"

Yoo Tae-woon spoke with difficulty.

"I think it's a good idea. It's indeed an approach that's typical of you, analyzing the test-maker's intentions first. But."

Yoo Tae-woon pointed to the list of Han Il-gu's writings that had been searched for on the screen.

"Isn't it a bit... too much?"

The academic writings with the tag 'Han Il-gu' easily exceeded several hundred at a glance.

[Han Il-gu, The Dualism of Being and Ought from the Perspective of Radbruch's Legal Philosophy]

[Han Il-gu, The Free Mandate of Members of Parliament and Their Constitutional Status in Political Power Struggles]

[Han Il-gu, The Development Process of Subjective Public Rights as Seen Through German Constitutional History]

...

Indeed, separate from any complaints about the Constitutional Court professor as a law school professor, his research activities and depth as a scholar were truly awe-inspiring.

Yoo Tae-woon, who was shuddering at the seemingly endless list of writings, asked.

"Are we going to read all of this...?"

"That's right. If we do this, the remedy might be worse than the disease."

Han Seol also agreed with a worried voice.

Of course, if we narrowed it down to the midterm exam range, the amount would decrease to some extent.

But the work itself of searching, finding, and gathering materials would also take a considerable amount of time, and what remained after that would not be an easy volume.

In the first place, each one was a thesis or a review posted somewhere.

How could we possibly read, summarize, and study each of those writings, which were at least several dozen pages long?

It wouldn't be strange to think that it would be better to memorize the entire lecture notes.

"That's a valid point."

But I shook my head.

"If we had to read 'everything,' that is."

"...What do you mean by that?"

I explained to Han Seol.

"Look closely. The year the exam questions were set, and the year the writings were published."

"The year? ...Oh, ahh!"

Han Seol, who had been looking back and forth between the writings on the screen and the past exam questions, exclaimed.

The 'subjective public right' question had been set in 2017. And the date the thesis on the same topic had been published was January 2017.

The question about 'Carl Schmitt' had been set in 2019, and the publication date of the related thesis was December 2018.

The rest of the questions were similar.

The Constitutional Court professor's internal exam questions, no matter how old they were, were only being drawn from writings published within a year of the exam date.

"Right. We don't need to look at everything. The exam questions only come from the writings he wrote within a year."

Thinking about it, it was obvious.

The Constitutional Court professor's exam trends reflected the areas of interest that he considered important.

Naturally, the more recently he had researched and written about a topic, the more likely it was that he was still interested in it.

In fact, the Constitutional Court professor I knew didn't adhere to one academic position, but constantly modified his views through research and discussion.

As a scholar, his conviction was that clinging to old ideas was just stubbornness.

There was no reason for him to leave aside his hot, fresh, current interests and instead rummage through old writings to create exam questions.

"Certainly, if we do this, the amount we have to read will decrease quite a bit, but...."

"It's still a lot."

Yoo Tae-woon and Han Seol murmured with a distressed look.

Indeed, reading entire theses to study for an exam was too much.

If it was Civil Law, maybe, but we couldn't allocate that much effort to the Constitutional Law exam, where we could only invest a limited amount of time.

But of course, there was no way I wouldn't know that.

"I knew you'd think that, so I prepared."

I snapped my fingers.

"It's time, disciple. Show them that."

"Yes, sir."

Lee Ha-roo stood up and switched places with me.

The expressions of the study group members who were watching were filled with question marks.

"Allow me to introduce. This is my masterpiece, imbued with the desire to get good scores on exams without effort."

Lee Ha-roo tapped on her laptop and executed a program.

"Its name is 'Easy-Peasy' search engine!"

With a whirring sound, the program called 'Easy-Peasy' displayed two windows.

In the left window, the conceptual keywords of the midterm exam range that had been extracted from the lecture notes were listed in a row.

• The principle of legal reservation

• The principle of protection of legitimate expectations

• Constitutional complaint

• Subjective public rights

• The subject of basic rights

• Carl Schmitt's constitutional theory
  ...

"These are the keywords that my master extracted. If you enter them here."

Lee Ha-roo tapped enter, and a list of writings appeared in the right window.

[Han Il-gu, The Development Process of Subjective Public Rights as Seen Through German Constitutional History]
[Han Il-gu, Analysis of the Yushin Constitution - Focusing on Carl Schmitt's Theory of Sovereign Dictatorship]
...

The number was a total of twelve.

"Like this, the documents that match the keywords pop up."

There was no need to bother searching one by one to see if there were materials, and if there were none, to check if they were posted anywhere else.

The search program that Lee Ha-roo had made would automatically extract and present the necessary documents from the sea of information with just the click of a button.

'But even though I set it to only extract the latest year and what's related to the midterm exam, there are still twelve.'

Not all law school professors were as prolific researchers as the Constitutional Court professor.

Some professors hadn't even published two theses in five years and were scolded by the evaluation committee.

Indeed, the Constitutional Court professor was an amazing human being in some sense.

To leave behind that many writings on a limited topic in just one year.

Thanks to that, those preparing for the exam were going to have a hard time.

It may only be twelve, but in terms of pages, it would be hundreds of pages.

The study group members were looking at the list with faces of exhaustion and were at a loss for what to do.

It was good that we had reduced the effort it took to select the materials to read.

But the fact that we had to read all of that ourselves, and extract the parts that we needed for exam preparation, was still too much of a burden.

"If someone could read and summarize it for us, that would be something."

"Can't we do that? Generative AI is popular these days. If we ask AI, wouldn't it magically summarize it for us?"

Such conversations were exchanged jokingly.

Then, Kim Seung-pil, who had been silent, chimed in.

"That's difficult."

He explained.

"Generative AI language models are still in the early stages. They can answer simple questions or summarize short texts, but legal papers, which have completely different vocabulary, structure, and grammar than everyday texts, are a completely different matter."

"You know a lot about this?"

"It was a hot topic. I had to study it a bit while writing related articles."

Kim Seung-pil shrugged at Yoo Tae-woon's question.

"The meaning of the original text will change, some key content will be lost, or sentences that don't fit the context will be mixed in. If you want to catch the errors, you have to read the thesis from the beginning anyway. So what's the point?"

Kim Seung-pil's words were correct.

The setting of 'In the Law School' was a few years in the past from when I had died.

Around this time, the first versions of AI language models had been released and were making a buzz, but they weren't yet capable of perfectly processing legal texts that were dozens of pages long.

More advanced versions would come out in the future, and models that were familiar with legal knowledge would also be developed.

But at this point, it was still a distant story.

For a program at the current level to flawlessly process the Constitutional Court professor's complex text, it needed a talented programmer who was fluent in Natural Language Processing and fine-tuning to adjust the settings.

In this era, and especially in law school, a den of humanities majors who had only read books their whole lives, there was no way someone like that would exist... There was.

"It works, though?"

"...?"

[‘Han Il-gu, The Development Process of Subjective Public Rights as Seen Through German Constitutional History’]

Lee Ha-roo clicked on a thesis and displayed the cover on the screen. The page number at the bottom was a whopping 75.

Then, a notification window appeared.

[Do you want to summarize this document?]

Lee Ha-roo nonchalantly clicked the notification window. In the moment when everyone was staring at her with stunned expressions.

[...Processing...]

[Completed.]

[Progress: 75/75p -> 5/5p]

On the screen, the thesis that was dozens of pages long was gone, and a five-page summary was in its place.