집단분쟁해결을 위한 새로운 민사소송제도의 도입에 관한 소고

Abstract

Incidents involving mass production, investment, and consumption victims are growing more frequent modern social structure. As a result of such phenomena, the number of similar types of damage inflict by a corporate or a specific person are rapidly increasing. However, the cost of monetary and human resources and time is too high for an individual to take legal measures against these types of damages; hence many nations are looking for new ways to efficiently resolve disputes in addition to traditional litigation procedures. The most notable examples of legislation are Class Action of U.S. and Verbandsklage of Germany. Similar move has been found in South Korea; Securities-Related Class Action based on Securities-Related Class Action Act on the stock market with regards to class action has been in place since 2005; Consumer Association Lawsuit was introduced as part of Framework Act on Consumers with regards to Verbandsklage and Personal Information Association Lawsuit based on Personal Information Protection Act were introduced in 2008 and 2011 respectively. Demand for collective dispute resolution such as the aforementioned has triggered Germany to look beyond Verbandsklage and to consider adopting Class Action from U.S. The legislation of KapMug in 2005 maintained the principle of individualism of Germany’s Civil Procedure while providing an independent resolution method different from collective dispute resolution of other nations. Similar to this procedure, U.S has adopted Multidistrict Litigation to prevent discovery overlap and contradiction during pretrial proceedings when multiple litigations that share common questions of fact. This study will briefly explore Securities-Related Class Action, Consumer Association Lawsuit, and Personal Information Association Lawsuit, which are recognized in South Korea, then will investigate Germany’s Musterverfahren and U.S.’ Multidistrict Litigation in depth in order to study new collective dispute resolution to resolve multiple litigations with common questions of fact in prompt and economical manner without contradiction. Nevertheless, this study did not include discussion on U.S’ Class Action and Germany’s Verbandsklage as there has been sufficient study and discussion on them.