LIGHTNOVELWORLD Chapter 28
Chapter 28
『 Translator – Divinity 』
The image that appeared on the screen was a familiar one, a midterm exam question from a few years ago for Constitutional Law I.
[Question 1. Examine the legislation of Korea and Germany regarding fundamental rights under the Constitution from a comparative law perspective, citing at least two examples, and criticize the following Constitutional Court precedent. (200 points)]
“What are your thoughts on this?”
When I asked, Lee Ha-ru pretended to vomit.
“Ugh. I’d rather choose death.”
“Honestly, I don’t know what he wants us to do.”
Yoo Tae-woon also gave a wry smile.
“Of course, there’s something about constitutional complaints in the professor’s lecture materials. Tucked away in an inconspicuous corner. But even if we memorize the entire hundred-page lecture material, it doesn’t seem like it would be enough.”
“Hmm, that’s a valid point.”
I nodded.
ConLaw’s lecture materials had no distinction between important and unimportant content.
Once, when someone asked him why, he apparently replied, “There’s nothing unimportant in what I teach.”
Therefore, no one knew what would be combined and appear on the exam.
This meant we had to memorize the entire hundred-page lecture material.
“But as we all know, that’s impossible.”
What subject takes up the most time in law school studies?
It’s Civil Law.
The reason is simple.
Most legal disputes in this country boil down to civil cases, “That guy didn’t pay me the money he owes me.”
Since there are many disputes, there are also many precedents, and with many precedents, there’s inevitably a lot to memorize and analyze.
The next most voluminous subject is Criminal Law.
The world is always full of people committing crimes and getting caught.
On the other hand, Constitutional Law and Administrative Law don’t take up that much space in exam-oriented legal studies.
From the perspective of an examinee, time is a limited resource.
Naturally, we have no choice but to allocate more time to the important subjects and use the remaining time to tackle the rest.
It means we don’t have the luxury 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 focus on those specific points and prepare, which would greatly reduce the burden.”
She was right.
The biggest difficulty with ConLaw’s exams lay precisely in this.
Even with an exam that covers a vast range, if the areas likely to be tested are predictable, it’s possible to reduce the effort required for preparation.
‘For example, like me, focusing on the main issues of the bar exam for review.’
However, ConLaw’s exams had no such trend.
The bar exam? Past bar exam questions? His style was a million miles away from those.
It was impossible to know what criteria to use to filter the content and adjust the focus.
In the end, most students gave up on properly preparing for ConLaw’s exams.
They had no choice but to be content with reading through the material once and then relying on their memory and luck to make up stories.
It was no surprise that ConLaw would get angry every year, saying that the quality of the students’ answers was terrible.
The study group members, sharing this sense of frustration, let out deep sighs.
“…But you see,”
Seeing that, I grinned.
“Is there really no trend?”
Everyone looked up in surprise.
“Huh?”
“W-what do you mean?”
“Think about it. What does ‘exam trend’ mean?”
In any exam, it’s ultimately an individual or a group that creates and sets the questions.
Then, what do they want to test?
“Naturally, they’ll test what they ‘want to test’.”
The essence of exam preparation is understanding that.
There’s a reason why we focus on past questions when studying for national exams.
It’s because the examiners want to test those, because they have a high chance of appearing, that’s why we prepare for them.
Then, we have to think that ConLaw’s exams are essentially the same.
“If we can just read his subjective criteria, what this noble scholar values, we can predict the exam questions.”
“…Is that possible?”
“Of course it is.”
I operated the laptop.
The image projected on the wall changed to a legal information database site and the Hankuk University library homepage, both familiar to any law school student.
“…Why the library all of a sudden?”
Han Seol asked.
“There’s a way to read his criteria here. Now, what were the keywords from the past exam question? Constitutional complaint. History. Comparative law.”
I said as I entered the same keywords into the search bar and pressed enter.
And then,
[Han Il-gu, Historical Development of Constitutional Complaints – Focusing on Comparative Law Analysis-]
A thesis appeared on the screen.
“…This is!”
Yoo Tae-woon’s jaw dropped.
“Han Il-gu? Did ConLaw write this thesis?”
Han Seol asked. Han Il-gu was ConLaw’s real name.
“That’s right.”
I nodded.
The same content as the exam questions ConLaw had set was included in the thesis he wrote.
What did that mean?
“Don’t tell me…”
Han Seol’s eyes widened.
“He’s putting his own research topics on the exam…?”
“Bingo.”
It wasn’t just a simple coincidence.
There was an exam question about the right to hold public office, and when I searched for it, a case comment titled “Criticism of the Constitutional Court’s Precedents on the Scope of Protection of the Right to Hold Public Office” appeared in the search results.
There was a question mentioning Schmitt’s constitutional theory, and when I searched for it, there was a paper titled “Analysis of the Yushin Constitution – Focusing on Carl Schmitt’s Theory of Sovereign Dictatorship.”
If it wasn’t in the library search results, a related writing by him could be found in the legal information database.
When it wasn’t even in the legal information database, a Google search would turn up a commentary he contributed to some website.
In the end, there was a corresponding academic work by ConLaw for every past exam question.
By this point, I could say with certainty,
“ConLaw, Han Il-gu, puts his own writings on the exam.”
I clapped my hands to get everyone’s attention.
“In other words, if we look at ConLaw’s writings, we can figure out what he’ll put on the exam.”
Even ConLaw couldn’t set questions on concepts that weren’t in the exam scope.
So, we just had to extract the concepts and keywords within the midterm exam scope, search for them in the law library, and find the corresponding materials.
The exam questions would definitely come from those materials.
To get a good score, we had to read ConLaw’s papers and articles, not his lecture materials.
“As expected of Mr. Park Yoo-seung! You found a way!”
Yoo Ye-seul exclaimed, flattering me.
She looked like a new employee desperately reacting to her boss’s jokes.
How did this person get to this point?
But the other study group members’ expressions remained dark.
“Um… Yoo-seung?”
Yoo Tae-woon spoke up hesitantly.
“I think it’s a good idea. It’s an approach that suits you, always analyzing the examiner’s intentions first. But,”
Yoo Tae-woon pointed at the list of ConLaw’s writings displayed on the screen.
“Isn’t it… a bit much?”
The academic writings tagged with ConLaw’s real name, ‘Han Il-gu’, easily numbered over a hundred at a glance.
[Han Il-gu, The Dichotomy of Sein and Sollen from the Perspective of Radbruch’s Legal Philosophy]
[Han Il-gu, Free Mandate of National Assembly Members and Their Constitutional Status in Political Power Struggles]
[Han Il-gu, The Development of Subjective Public Rights: A Look Through German Constitutional History]
…
Indeed, regardless of my dissatisfaction with ConLaw as a law school professor, his research output and depth as a scholar were awe-inspiring.
As the seemingly endless list of writings continued, Yoo Tae-woon shuddered and asked,
“Are you saying we have to read all of this…?”
“That’s right. If we do this, the cart might end up being bigger than the horse.”
Han Seol agreed with concern.
Of course, the amount would be somewhat reduced if we filtered it down to the midterm exam scope.
But even the process of searching and gathering materials would take a considerable amount of time, and what remained after filtering wouldn’t be a small amount either.
In the first place, each item was a thesis or a commentary contributed somewhere.
How could we possibly read, summarize, and study dozens of pages of writings one by one?
It wouldn’t be strange to think that memorizing the entire lecture material would be better.
“That’s a valid point.”
But I shook my head.
“If we had to read ‘everything’, that is.”
“…What do you mean?”
I explained to Han Seol,
“Look closely. At the year the past exam questions were given and the year the writings were published.”
“The year? …Oh, ah!”
Han Seol exclaimed as she looked back and forth between the writings on the screen and the Constitutional Law I past exam questions.
The ‘subjective public rights’ question was given in 2017. And the date the paper on the same topic was published was January 2017.
The question about ‘Carl Schmitt’ was given in 2019, and the publication date of the related paper was December 2018.
The rest of the questions followed a similar pattern.
ConLaw’s midterm exam questions, no matter how old, were only derived from writings published within one year of the exam date.
“That’s right. We don’t have to read everything. The exam questions only come from writings published within a year.”
Thinking about it, it was only natural.
ConLaw’s exam trends reflected his interests and what he considered important.
Naturally, the more recent his research and writing, the higher the possibility that he was still interested in it.
Indeed, the ConLaw I knew didn’t cling to a single academic stance but continuously revised his own views through research and discussion.
His belief as a scholar was that holding onto old ideas was nothing but dogma.
There was no reason for him to rummage through his old writings and create exam questions, neglecting his latest interests.
“Certainly, this reduces the amount we have to look at… but…”
“It’s still a lot.”
Yoo Tae-woon and Han Seol murmured with regret.
It was indeed unreasonable to read entire theses for exam preparation.
While it might be possible for Civil Law, we couldn’t dedicate that much effort to the Constitutional Law exam, for which we could only allocate a limited amount of time.
But of course, I knew that.
“I prepared for that.”
I snapped my fingers.
“It’s time, my disciple. Show them.”
“Yes, sir.”
Lee Ha-ru jumped up and switched places with me.
Question marks were floating around in the expressions of the observing study group members.
“Let me introduce you to my masterpiece, created with the wish to get exam scores effortlessly.”
Lee Ha-ru tapped on the laptop and ran a program.
“Behold, the search engine ‘Effortless’!”
With a whirring sound, the program called ‘Effortless’ opened two windows.
In the left window, the conceptual keywords within the midterm exam scope, extracted from the lecture materials, were lined up.
• Principle of Legality
• Principle of Protection of Legitimate Expectations
• Constitutional Complaint
• Subjective Public Rights
• Capacity as a Subject of Fundamental Rights
• Carl Schmitt’s Constitutional Theory
…
“Master extracted these keywords. If you enter them here,”
Lee Ha-ru tapped the enter key, and a list of writings appeared in the right window.
[Han Il-gu, The Development of Subjective Public Rights: A Look Through German Constitutional History]
[Han Il-gu, Analysis of the Yushin Constitution – Focusing on Carl Schmitt’s Theory of Sovereign Dictatorship]
…
A total of twelve articles.
“Like this, the documents matching the keywords appear.”
There was no need to search for each one individually, checking if there were any materials and if not, searching elsewhere.
The search program Lee Ha-ru created would automatically extract the necessary documents from the sea of information with a single click.
‘But even after setting it to only extract those related to the midterm exam scope from the past year, there are still twelve articles.’
Not all law school professors were as energetic researchers as ConLaw.
Some professors were even reprimanded by the evaluation committee for publishing less than two papers in five years.
ConLaw was indeed an extraordinary person, in every sense of the word.
To think he had produced this much writing on a limited topic in just one year.
Thanks to that, those of us preparing for the exam were going to have a hard time.
Although there were only twelve articles, it would amount to hundreds of pages in terms of volume.
The study group members were looking at the list with weary expressions, feeling overwhelmed.
It was good that we had reduced the effort required to select the materials to study.
But still, having to read all of that and extract the parts necessary for exam preparation was too much of a burden.
“Unless someone reads and summarizes it for us…”
“Is that not possible? Generative AI is all the rage these days. Couldn’t we ask AI to magically organize it for us?”
Such conversations were exchanged jokingly.
Then, Kim Seung-pil, who had been silent, spoke up.
“That’s difficult.”
He explained,
“Generative AI language models are still in their early stages. They might be able to answer simple questions or summarize short texts, but legal papers, with their vastly different vocabulary usage, structure, and grammar compared to everyday texts, are a completely different matter.”
“You seem to know a lot about this.”
“It was a hot topic. I studied it a bit to write a related article.”
Kim Seung-pil shrugged at Yoo Tae-woon’s question.
“The meaning might be different from the original, or some of the key content might be lost, or sentences that don’t fit the context might be mixed in. To catch those errors, you would have to read the paper from the beginning anyway. What would be the point then?”
Kim Seung-pil was right.
The setting of “In the Law School” was a few years in the past from when I died.
Although the early version of the AI language model had just been released around this time and was causing a stir, it wasn’t capable of perfectly refining dozens of pages of legal text.
More advanced versions would come out in the future, and models familiar with legal knowledge would be developed.
But at this point in time, that was still a long way off.
For a program at this level to process ConLaw’s complex texts without errors, it would require an exceptional programmer who could freely handle natural language processing models and fine-tuning to adjust the settings.
In this era, and in a law school full of humanities students who had spent their lives reading only text, there was no way such a person could exist… or so I thought.
“It works, though?”
“…?”
[‘Han Il-gu, The Development of Subjective Public Rights: A Look Through German Constitutional History’]
Lee Ha-ru clicked on one of the papers and displayed the cover on the screen. The number of pages indicated at the bottom was a whopping 75.
Then, a notification window appeared.
[Summarize this material?]
Lee Ha-ru nonchalantly clicked the notification. As everyone stared at her with dumbfounded expressions,
[… Processing… ]
[Completed.]
[Result: 75/75p -> 5/5p]
On the screen projected on the wall, the dozens of pages of the thesis were gone, replaced by a five-page summary.