Lawyer and politician; four-term lawmaker and Uri Party chairman
| Life | 1952 |
| Era | 현대 (대한민국) |
| Clan | 영월 신씨 |
Shin Ki-nam (辛基南, born 1952) is a South Korean lawyer and politician of the Yeongwol Shin clan. Born on 16 October 1952 in Namwon, North Jeolla, he attended Susong Elementary School in Seoul, Kyunggi Middle and High Schools, graduated from Seoul National University's College of Law in 1976, and earned a master of laws there in 1987.
Commissioned as a navy officer in 1976, he taught at the Korea Naval Academy from 1979 to 1982. He passed the 24th bar examination in 1982 and became a lawyer, serving on the human-rights committee and as an executive of the Seoul Bar Association, and became known to the public as host of KBS's Yeouido Court (1990) and MBC's live legal program (1994).
He was elected to the National Assembly for Seoul's Gangseo A district in 1996 for the National Congress for New Politics, and again in 2000, 2004 and 2012 for the Millennium Democratic, Uri and Democratic United parties, for four terms; he lost in 2008 and 2016. He became chairman of the Uri Party in May 2004, but in August that year, after it emerged that his father had served as a Japanese military policeman during the colonial period, he apologized at a press conference and stepped down; Lee Bu-young succeeded him. In 2005 he chaired the National Assembly Intelligence Committee.
Outside politics he chaired the organizing committee of the 2006 World Library and Information Congress, was honorary president of the Korean Library Association, and from April 2018 to April 2022 chaired the Presidential Committee on Library and Information Policy. He also co-chaired a progressive policy institute and a welfare-state campaign, and in 2019 published a novel under the pen name Shin Yeong.