hankyoreh

An entrance to a law school. (by Ryu Woo-jong

About 40 children of jurists - including a former Supreme Court justice and former and current senior public prosecutors - have been fingered in an investigation by the Ministry of Education on charges of unfair admission to law school.

The Ministry recently asked a law firm to review the legality of revoking these children‘s admission to law school and sanctioning the schools in question, the Hankyoreh has confirmed. Legal sources have also shared information about some of the cases in question, including the child of the former Supreme Court justice.

According to multiple sources at law schools and in the legal community who were interviewed by the Hankyoreh on Apr. 18, the Ministry found an average of 20 to 30 cases of unfair admissions per school in an exhaustive investigation of the admission procedures at 25 law schools around the country that it conducted from Dec. 16, 2015, to Jan. 28, 2016.

Among these cases were about 10 children of senior judges, including a former Supreme Court justice, and about 30 children of high-ranking public prosecutors whom the Ministry reportedly determined had included information in their personal statements and other documents in their law school applications that made it possible to ascertain their parents’ identities.

“Most of the suspicious applications that turned up had been submitted by the children of jurists,” said a source at a law school association that observed the Ministry‘s on-site investigation. “If there was the slightest trace of an attempt to reveal their parents’ background - such as remarks about seeing their dad studying late into the night or learning from the good example that their father showed as a high-ranking public servant - we collected them as being possible cases of unfair admission.”

The most controversial of all is the child of a former Supreme Court justice. This student’s personal statement mentions the school that his father studied at, the year his father entered the Judicial Research and Training Institute and even his father’s career as a Supreme Court justice.

“It was also common for other students to mention their parents‘ occupations in their personal statements,” said a source who took part in the Ministry’s investigation. “There were even some students who only talked about their fathers from the beginning to the end of their personal statements.”

The Ministry is reportedly considering the option of having the schools revoke the admission of the students who were identified in this investigation. The Ministry reportedly intends to take disciplinary action not only against the students whose unfair admission was shown in the investigation but also against the law schools that admitted them.

In related news, the Daegu Metropolitan Police Agency, which is currently investigating suspicions of unfair admissions at Kyungpook National University Law School, reportedly received from the school the personal statement of a student who is suspected of unfair admissions in which the student wrote that “my father is a lawyer and former public prosecutor.”

The police recently had the employee in charge of reviewing the admission documents come in for questioning and also paid a visit to the dean of the law school to ask him some questions. The police are planning to continue their investigation to determine whether the father of the student in question made an inappropriate request and whether this request influenced the admission process.

If the police determine that the request did influence the student’s admission to the law school, they are likely to charge the father with obstructing justice through a fraudulent scheme and preventing the exercise of rights by overstepping his authority.

In a previously released book, Shin Pyeong, a professor at Kyungpook National University, revealed that a professor at the university’s law school had visited his office and asked him to make sure that the son of a lawyer identified by the letter K, who was applying to the school, would be accepted. During the interview of K‘s son, one professor reportedly asked if the applicant’s father had been a public prosecutor, which resulted in K’s full name being mentioned in the interview, stirring up controversy.

By Seo Young-ji, staff reporter

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