Marie Seong-Hak Kim
Marie Seong-Hak Kim is a historian and jurist. She is known for her work of comparing European and East Asian legal history, with emphasis on the sources of law, legal theories, and court practices.
Early life and education
Kim was born in Seoul, South Korea. Her father,, was a justice of the Supreme Court of Korea from 1973 through 1980. She graduated from Ewha Woman's University in Seoul. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota, where she worked under Paul W. Bamford and James D. Tracy. She also earned her J.D. from the University of Minnesota Law School.Scholarship
Kim's Law and Custom in Korea: Comparative Legal History was the first study that comprehensively examined Korean legal history in comparison with European legal history, with particular focus on customary law. A reviewer remarked that the book was far more than a presentation on Korean law and that it instead provided a “more general reflection on the development of customary law in the colonial context”. It demonstrated, as observed by another reviewer, that “there is more than one way of approaching the role of law in the construction of empire ”. Her book revised the dominant view in historiography that premodern Korea had a system of private law in the form of customary law. Kim credited Jérôme Bourgon's work in Chinese law for this insight. She has argued that the concept of custom in the legal meaning of the term in East Asia was constructed by the Meiji legal elites in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as they tried to facilitate the transplant of European civil law to Japan. This imported notion of custom as law spread to China and Korea, serving as an intermediary regime between tradition and the demands of modern civil law. Japanese law had profound influence throughout East Asia, in particular in Korea which was a Japanese colony.Kim's Constitutional Transition and the Travail of Judges: The Courts of South Korea was a study of the evolution of the judicial process and jurisprudence in modern South Korea, seen against the backdrop of the country's political and constitutional vicissitudes. This work was also comparative in its core, contextualizing constitutional authoritarianism in the twentieth century, including Weimar Germany and Latin America. Her investigation into and interpretation of judicial travails in the 1970s under the Yusin Constitution brought “the South Korean case into the general discussions of authoritarian legalism and of transitional justice taking place around the world”.
In her latest book, Custom, Law, and Monarchy: A Legal History of Early Modern France, she returned to her earlier research interest in the French ancien régime. Originally trained as a sixteenth-century French historian she published her first book in 1997 on Michel de L’Hôpital, chancellor of France from 1560 through 1568 during the French Religious Wars. Her 2010 article on L’Hôpital and early modern French law was the subject of a LHR Forum in Law and History Review. Custom, Law, and Monarchy deals with “the history of the redaction of French customs from the middle of the fifteenth century until the abolition of customary law in 1789, set against on the one hand the development of royal absolutism and on the other, scholarly debate about the true source of law.” Kim “placed private law in relation to public law and explored the spirit of traditional law in connection with fundamental laws, politics, and the formation of the French legal model in competition with the Roman model.” This book “demonstrates the powerful convergence between political requirement and legal logic” and “shows that one of the primary characteristics of law is to adapt, to constantly transform itself to meet the ever-changing needs of social and political life.” Kim's stated goal for writing this book was “to bridge the divides among l’histoire, l’histoire du droit, and le droit.” She thus provided “a series of carefully documented case studies of the processes involved as the lawyers grappled with thorny issues such as property rights, marriage and inheritance, outlining the successes, and often setbacks the monarchy and its servants faced when trying to bring ‘efficiency and unity into the kingdom’s laws’.” Notably, she “takes into account the weight of financial and social constraints, which is not so common for a legal historian,” and "weaves a historiographical account of the ways in which French historians and lawyers have treated and understood their law.”
A central conceptual framework in her research is the role of customary law in the formation of modern states. "Kim relies on H. Patrick Glenn's evolutionary stages of custom in Europe: capture, reconstruction and marginalisation” and has applied them to her analysis of East Asian law, showing “how a comparative legal historical approach can be executed in a fruitful manner and, moreover, how it can help to cross not only the confines of time and space but also the confines of legal cultures." She has argued that the codification of customs was a recurring pattern in the process of receiving outside law, as witnessed across history from medieval France to Meiji Japan to colonial scenes. Of late, she has written on the South Korea-Japan relations surrounding colonial compensation.
Kim's political and jurisprudential approach to law has been contrasted to that of more culturally attuned historians. Described as “primarily a lawyer's history”, her writings focusing on politics and state legal institutions. Her scholarship has been noted as “a comparative law study that is unique for its kind to date.” Alan Watson stated in 2012 that Kim's book, Law and Custom in Korea, “is the best law book I have read in several years.”