Abstract
Land-related legislation in Korea greatly increased during the 1970s as rapid industrialization and urbanization accelerated national land development. However, the reality of continuously producing similar laws without fundamental reorgani...
Abstract
Land-related legislation in Korea greatly increased during the 1970s as rapid industrialization and urbanization accelerated national land development. However, the reality of continuously producing similar laws without fundamental reorganization of these overflowing land-related statutes has posed significant problems. Thus, it is necessary to integrate and coordinate these laws according to their functions and characteristics. Research on land public law has generally been addressed within administrative law subfields such as public burden law, construction administration law, and regional development administration law, covering topics like public restrictions, public expropriation, land readjustment, national land planning, urban development, urban renewal, urban regeneration, and building law. Yet, the theories of land-related law treated in administrative law subfields only cover limited portions of traditional administrative action law and fail to encompass all relevant statutes. Given the considerable role that land-related legislation plays in everyday life, the independence of land public law as a discipline needs to be strengthened. Of course, land public law is fundamentally a form of administrative law, inheriting the formal, substantive, and doctrinal characteristics of administrative law, and applying its general principles. Nevertheless, due to its unique position and characteristics, land public law is distinguished by its high degree of technicality, instrumentality, and planning orientation. It is characterized by principles of publicity, social optimal utility, stability of national livelihood, fair burden-sharing, and equitable distribution. On this basis, Korean land public law has developed around three major tasks: harmonization of public and private interests, sustainable national land management, and protection of property rights. Looking ahead, the discipline must continue to address the increasingly complex legislative structures arising from unpredictable social changes, integrate scattered statutes, and explore issues such as the compatibility of property rights with public welfare, balanced regional development, national land resource management, housing rights protection, policies responding to climate change and environmental pollution, and measures to restore still-weak citizen participation. The foundation for these tasks lies in further advancing land public law as an independent academic discipline and promoting more active research in the field.