From the Age of “Ideology” to the Age of “Methodology”: A Retrospective on Professor Seoung-Jae Yu’s Methodology of Labor Law

This study reflects on the history of Korean labor law scholarship, in which methodological sophistication in legal reasoning has often been overlooked due to an excessive emphasis on the normative “ideology of worker protection,” and seeks, through the scholarly achievements of Professor Seoung-Jae Yu, to explore ways of securing systematic coherence within the interpretive discipline of the rule of law. It criticizes the tendency to transcend the limits of judicial law-making by attempting to expand legal concepts without restraint solely on the basis of the need for labor-law protection, and argues that orthodox legal methodology (Juristische Methodenlehre), faithful to the normative meaningful relationship between legal requirements and legal effects, is indispensable for the academic maturation of labor law scholarship. To this end, this article re-examines, from a methodological perspective, the core fields of research pioneered by Professor Yu: the determination of employee status, the theory of legal sources, and the interpretation of collective agreements. In particular, it analyzes the mechanism by which employee status is derived through teleological concept formation based on the German theory of entrepreneurial risk, and, in the problem of conflict between legal sources where disad- vantageously amended rules of employment collide with individual employment contracts, it presents a refined model of systematic coherence grounded in the text of positive law, rather than resorting to the abstract and excessive use of the principle of favorability. Furthermore, this study demonstrates that such methodological sophistication has even greater force and capacity for expansion in the rapidly changing contemporary labor environment, including platform work, crowdwork, and algorithmic control. In a digital-interface environ- ment in which direct direction and supervision are obscured, a teleological concept of the employee that captures “other-determinedness” and “functional integration into an organization” becomes a practical alternative for addressing modern gaps in protection. In conclusion, this article suggests that a methodological turn that does not become absorbed in the normative imperatives of ideology, but instead adheres to the discipline of the rule of law, is the mature direction of development toward which Korean labor law scholarship should aspire.