Marie Seong-Hak Kim

Kim's Constitutional Transition and the Travail of Judges: The Courts of South Korea (2019) 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”.

Kim's Law and Custom in Korea: Comparative Legal History (2012) 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 (and of empire in the construction of law)”. 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 (1910 – 1945).

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 depart from the dominant trend, of late, of social and cultural history of law. 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.”

She was a Fellow at several research institutes in Europe, including the Collegium de Lyon (2011–2012), the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (2013–2014), the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (EURIAS and Marie Curie Fellow of the European Union) (2016–2017), and Käte Hamburger Kolleg "Recht als Kultur" at the University of Bonn (2019). She is the recipient of the Fulbright Senior Scholar Grant, the National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, and the Social Science Research Council Abe Fellowship

Originally trained as a sixteenth-century French historian, Kim has continued writing on French legal history. Her 2010 article on Michel de L’Hôpital, chancellor of France from 1560 through 1568 during the French Religious Wars, and early modern French law was the subject of a LHR Forum in Law and History Review.

Kim was born in Seoul, South Korea. Her father, Kim Yun-haeng [ko], 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.

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 (1940–2014) 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 (receiving Roman law) to Meiji Japan (embracing European civil law) to colonial scenes (transplanting metropolitan law). Her book, Custom, Law, and Monarchy: A Legal History of Early Modern France (2021), reinforced the foundation of her work in customary law.