Since the economic crisis and famine years of the mid-1990s, there has been intermittent speculation that North Korea has reached a point where it will have to thoroughly reform its entire operational stmcture or face inevitable collapse. While most of this speculation has focused on political or economic pressures to induce the necessary measures of domestic reform, very little has focused on the murky maneuverings of North Korea's legal system. While North Korea's legal system is often dismissed as being a mere façade for a dictatorial state, and while the cantankerous ire of North Korea toward the general principles of intemational law is often cited as evidence for its status as a rogue state, the reality is that North Korea's legal system does have substantive elements that are essential to the proper functioning of the state and to the process of reform. The North Korean state has in fact engaged in several initiatives of legal reform, both in its domestic and international practice, since the mid-1990s. It is argued here that no program of political or economic reform can succeed without a simultaneous restructuring of the North Korean legal system, and that current initiatives toward legal reform in North Korea, in their domestic and international context, are insufficiently integrated to support a successfiil and sustainable political or economic transition. In other words, legal reform, far more than political or economic reform, may be the most important factor in ensuring North Korea's domestic stability and intemational réintégration.