In Search of the Constitution: How the Constitution Generated the Public Power in South Korea (1963-1979)
This study challenges the positivist view of the Korean Constitution, which sees it merely as an assemblage of rules and statutes defining its citizens’ status and setting out codes of conduct for the government, or mapping the government’s institutional arrangements. Prevalent in Korean constitutional thought and practice, this view wholly fails to capture what it implies for how the polity governs or is governed. Because it assumes that the state and its constitutional law came into being prior to any structure of political entitlement, Korean constitutional scholarship has focused only its textual meaning and assessing the relative weight of individual statutes or articles of the Constitution. This has narrowed scholarly inquiry into the political significance of the Constitution into a dispute over the source of sovereignty. The dissertation aims to (re)discover the political nature of the Korean constitution with the 1962 and 1972 constitutions.
Constitution, Korean Constitution, Park Chung Hee, Carl Schmitt, Korean State, Korean Law, Legal Positivism, Korean Liberal Democracy, Korean Presidential Supremacy
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