1. Case Overview
The intervening defendant is a school foundation that established and operates University A, and the plaintiff was a faculty member at University A whose appointment was scheduled to expire on February 28, 2022. According to the university's regulations, for faculty reappointment, seven academic papers must be published during the appointment period. If a paper is scheduled to be published but not yet available at the time of the reappointment review, the faculty member must submit a certificate proving its scheduled publication date falls within the appointment period to the Faculty Performance Evaluation Committee and later submit the original publication within the term (hereinafter referred to as the "Required Academic Publication Criteria"). The plaintiff was notified of non-reappointment on the grounds of falling short by six papers. Subsequently, in December 2021, the plaintiff published two papers and submitted their offprints in January 2022. For the remaining four papers, the plaintiff obtained certificates of scheduled publication on February 28, 2022 (showing the expected publication date as February 28, 2022) and submitted these to the Office of Academic Affairs, but did not submit the original publications or offprints. All four papers were published in academic journals listed by the National Research Foundation of Korea and were registered in the Korea Citation Index (KCI) between late February and March 2022, becoming available online. The plaintiff filed an administrative appeal seeking cancellation of the non-reappointment decision. When the appeal was dismissed, the plaintiff filed a lawsuit challenging the decision of the appeals committee on grounds of unlawfulness.
The lower court ruled in favor of the plaintiff, stating that because the plaintiff had submitted proof of scheduled publication for four papers by February 28, 2022 (within the appointment term), the university should have conducted a substantive review of those papers. The court held that the university had abused its discretion by issuing the non-reappointment notice without a fair evaluation process.
2. Key Issue and Our Role
The main legal issue in this case was whether the university had abused its discretion by not conducting a substantive review of the four papers for which the plaintiff submitted proof of scheduled publication on February 28, 2022 within the appointment period, and which were in fact published later.
We argued:
① University regulations, grounded in the Constitution and relevant laws, have binding force in the absence of exceptional circumstances. Therefore, a non-reappointment decision based on those regulations does not constitute an abuse of discretion.
② A certificate of scheduled publication does not allow for a substantive review of the article's content. Conducting a review based on an unfinalized manuscript compromises the fairness of the evaluation by treating unpublished works as if they were valid.
③ The plaintiff's inability to have the four papers substantively reviewed was not due to the evaluation committee's failure to give the plaintiff any evaluation opportunity but rather because the plaintiff only submitted certificates without the articles' contents on the last day of the appointment period.
④ Even if the plaintiff met the publication requirement after the appointment period ended, that fact could not be considered in the current reappointment review.
We actively asserted these points based on a thorough legal analysis and objective facts.
3. Supreme Court Decision and Significance
The Supreme Court accepted most of our arguments and overturned the lower court's ruling, finding that the non-reappointment decision did not constitute an abuse of discretion for failing to substantively review the four papers.
If the lower court's decision had been upheld, the university would be required in future reappointment reviews to wait until papers submitted with only proof of scheduled publication are listed in the KCI and verifiable before making final decisions. This would impose significant operational burdens on the university's academic calendar. Thanks to our sound legal reasoning and argumentation, the Supreme Court issued a reversal and remand decision in just about four months after the appeal was filed.
