Community Service

This week, the Judicial Research and Training Institute (the finishing school for all Korean law students) has ordered one of its graduating trainees to do 300 hours of community service and graduate late. This is because the trainee sent transcripts to potential employers in which he fakes his grades. He accomplished this by manually editing the document, scanning it, and printing it.

What struck me first and most forcefully was what I would call the incredible leniency shown to him. Besides giving the student such a light penalty when even disbarment might be reasonable, the institute and the press have kept the student's identity secret. Well, not including the places he sent those bogus transcripts, and anyone they see fit to tell about it.

However corny this may sound, given the jokes I'm told people make about our profession, the legal profession is one that relies on individual integrity to work. How can a lawyer who would lie at such a basic and elemental level be trusted later in his career, when the stakes get really high? I have to wonder: did the institute consider that this move suggests to the people of Korea how indispensable it finds integrity among the attorneys it sends out into society?

RE: Re: Judicial Independence

There has been an ongoing row here about the doings of Supreme Court Justice Shin Young-chul. Justice Shin was recently elevated from his position as the head judge of the Seoul Central District Court. While head of the district court, Justice Shin sent a series of e-mails to district judges, encouraging them to speed up trials of anti-U.S. beef protestors. These e-mails instructed some judges to discourage motions that would frustrate such prosecutions.

It should be pointed out that judges in South Korea do not have perpetual appointments. They are promoted and demoted based on their performance, which is in part decided by the head of their court. This means all the judges e-mailed by Justice Shin owed their future appointments in part to his evaluations of him.

When the scandal broke, charges were laid against Justice Shin. Finally, the Supreme Court's Chief Justice elected only to verbally reprimand him. Justice Shin's written apology followed, and that was the extent of his punishment thus far.

A number of judges across the city and the country are angry at this outcome. They met to consider demanding that Justice Shin resign, or otherwise the National Assembly should impeach him.