He had completely erased the fatigue that had been deeply embedded in his face until just now. Formally dressed, he was a bit more expressionless. This seemed to be what he looked like when working.
“Then could I see the organized materials?”
He brought an armful of documents wrapped in a pink wrapping cloth. I became troubled. When taking court materials outside, we still had to use the old-fashioned method. I didn’t have the confidence to carry that all the way home. Im Ji-seok, reading my difficulty, asked,
“Did you not bring a car?”
“No. It’s close, so I walked.”
I got a jeonse for a 30-year-old apartment building in front of the courthouse. Even 30-year-old homes were expensive in the middle of Gangnam. I fully utilized the advantage of being in a safe occupation that made it convenient for banks to garnish wages.
The bank presented a loan agreement exceeding 50 pages. It was suspicious enough to make me wonder if they deliberately made the terms long to make debtors give up any attempt to read them. Of course, it was lawyers who helped with that. I signed about twenty times, but of course didn’t read all the terms. I signed as instructed where the bank employee had highlighted with a fluorescent marker. It was the same signature I put on verdicts.
“If it’s alright with you, I’ll drive you home.”
He added, rubbing his dry face,
“As an apology as well…”
Im Ji-seok’s car, unlike the neatness with which he had organized my desk in one go, had documents scattered haphazardly in the back seat. He roughly swept the piles of documents to one side and loaded my pink wrapping cloth.
“It’s an old car. My colleagues tell me to change it, but it’s still sturdy. I had it serviced a few days ago, so don’t worry.”
As Im Ji-seok said, his domestic car looked quite old. But the ride was good. His driving skills seemed decent. The passenger seat was a bit tight, probably his girlfriend’s seat, but I didn’t bother adjusting it. He turned up the heater and opened the window.
“I’ll air it out. You don’t like cigarette smoke, right?”
“The associate judge I shared a room with at my previous court smoked a pack of cigarettes a day. Once when we were working late, we didn’t ventilate properly and the fire alarm went off—we almost got disciplined.”
I said it to be funny, but Im Ji-seok didn’t laugh.
“Honestly, I thought I was screwed earlier.”
When the car passed through the courthouse main gate, he rolled up the window. His fingers tapped the steering wheel twice, as if anxious.
“Why? Because you ran into me while smoking?”
“I was rude earlier. You looked so young… I never thought you were a newly transferred judge.”
“I’m old. I’m thirty-four.”
“Honestly, you look younger than me.”
At that point, he laughed a little. His flattery was top-notch.
“I passed during undergrad. In my third year.”
“You must have a lot to organize. Are you okay with giving up your vacation and going straight into trial?”
“That doesn’t seem like something a judicial clerk who equally gave up vacation should say.”
Only then did he let out a small laugh. I asked what I’d been curious about since earlier.
“Do you have a case that’s not going well? Enough to give up vacation?”
Gangnam Boulevard during rush hour was a parking lot. I still lacked the adaptability to accept the situation of being stopped in a car for over ten minutes for a distance that took fifteen minutes on foot.
“Actually, it’s work that remained from the previous trial division. During a small claims trial, I asked the judge. I asked if I could write the reasoning for the final small claims cases, and if there were no issues after review, whether they could be recorded in the verdict.”
I looked at Im Ji-seok. It was the same expression as when he was smoking while looking at the sky in the empty office. A face half mixed with persistence and resignation. I sometimes feel that they are opposites yet one. A certain persistence and emptiness don’t settle into one definition but constantly go back and forth between both sides, tormenting a person. I knew that a certain persistence ultimately leads to resignation.
“There’s no way the judge in charge would have accepted that request.”
Im Ji-seok laughed lowly. Somewhat self-deprecatingly.
Small claims cases are trials with low litigation amounts. There are desperate people who absolutely must receive even small amounts. Unpaid bills, rotating credit association money, a few hundred thousand won lent without a loan certificate. Naturally, because they don’t have money to hire lawyers, the submitted briefs are a mess and incoherent complaints unfold in court. Small claims judges must process about 400 such cases per month. Once trial begins, it repeats all day long with people coming in and out like boxes on a conveyor belt.
For these practical reasons, verdicts in small claims cases don’t need to include reasoning. But I also questioned whether a one-line verdict saying “The plaintiff’s claim is dismissed” was appropriate for people who might be stepping into a court for the first time in their lives because of this case.
“Yes, I was scolded by the judge. But whether it’s the plaintiff or defendant, they’re so frustrated when they lose without any reasoning. We know the reasons roughly, but ordinary people don’t understand legal principles well. Actually, sometimes even I don’t know why the judge made that decision…”
“They wouldn’t have refused just because it was troublesome work.”
“I started with enthusiasm at first, but after trying it, I realized. That I was just overeager. Most cases are difficult to write proper reasoning for.”
Since being assigned a single-judge division in my fifth year, I had been writing reasoning for all small claims verdicts. For that, some local bar associations and civic groups sent positive evaluations. But internally, I received glares from colleagues. Because complaints directly comparing trial divisions came in. In the organization, my good intentions became someone else’s wrongdoing.
Fellow judges asked why I was wasting time like that. In a case that usually ends with a verdict to compensate a certain amount, I put two years’ worth of accounting ledger details on the trial bench to recover just an additional 250,000 won.
It took a full ten thousand hours to review all of that. The wages the business owner had failed to pay were the daughter’s hospital bills. It wasn’t behavior that welled up from a tremendous sense of mission or responsibility. I simply couldn’t dismiss those cases as just two sheets of paper with a lawsuit value tag of 500,000 won. It was work for me, but for them, it was life.
At the time, I worked overtime every day. I had no one to meet after work anyway, and I didn’t enjoy leisure activities. The problem was my body couldn’t endure it. There seemed to be stress I hadn’t even noticed myself. When my lifestyle became irregular, insomnia developed. On days I couldn’t sleep, the aftereffects lasted all day. Eventually, I collapsed in the courthouse parking lot on my way to work.
Back then, I felt trapped in a dead-end alley. Unable to endure but also unable to run away. I see that version of me now in Im Ji-seok’s face. I wanted to let him know there was also a path to go slowly. I had no one to tell me that.
“Small courts have all kinds of cases. Elderly people fight over whether a chicken is yours or mine, even over a single chicken.”
Im Ji-seok looked at me with a face that said it was hard to believe.
“For instance, ‘The ownership of the chicken belongs to the defendant, but the defendant must compensate the plaintiff for the eggs’—I could make that verdict. But if you ask me to write the reasoning, it’s difficult.”
“What do you do with cases like that?”
“I gave them plenty of time. Usually small claims cases just end with reading the verdict in one minute. Instead, I said if they had any grievances, I’d listen to everything, so tell me all of it. They each complain for about five minutes, and later stories from ten years ago come out. How they were hurt back then, how they actually weren’t this kind of relationship before.”
Even remembering it again, it was a funny sight. Just then, Ji-seok’s car smoothly stopped in the apartment parking lot.
“For things where the legal principles are clear, you can write based on that. Among the claims both sides made, distinguish between the parts accepted and the parts rejected and let them know. But there’s no need to cling only to legal principles. For fights where the emotional element is large, like I said, you embrace those emotions a bit. So even if they can’t accept the verdict, their feelings are less hurt. This is all work done by people, and flexible responses are accepted more often than you’d think.”
“Will the judge allow it?”
“Hmm… It doesn’t have to be right now. It’s good to wait until Researcher Im gains more authority. I hope you don’t push yourself too hard.”
As if my words became a period to his dizzy mind, Ji-seok smiled refreshingly for the first time. But I had a feeling he wouldn’t give up easily.
“Thank you.”
“Still, if there’s a case that absolutely won’t work out, bring it to me.”
Im Ji-seok looked at me as if to say something more, then opened the car door and got out. After taking out the wrapping cloth from the back seat, he walked around the car body to my side and opened the door. He was the type who would be popular with women.
“See you tomorrow then.”
He stood there holding the bundle of documents as is.
“I’ll carry it to your door.”
Telling a junior I’d just met about the apartment was one thing, but I didn’t feel like revealing the unit number. When I lightly shook my head, he handed over the wrapping cloth without any particular words. I gave him a final greeting before Im Ji-seok could say anything more. I walked to the entrance in one go. I felt his gaze but didn’t look back.
I took out the tax notices and advertising flyers stuck in the mailbox. I empty the mailbox clean every day. To avoid leaving traces outside that could reveal my private life. I climbed the stairs. The five-story building had no elevator. Lights turned on everywhere I passed. When I arrived at the end of the old corridor-style apartment, a black plastic bag was hanging on the front door handle.
A suspicious plastic bag hanging in front of a judge’s house would be worth reporting, but the smell was too sweet. I looked inside the bag. It was still-warm hoppang. The person who brought this was obvious. Ahn Jong-hwa. My middle school classmate and orphanage mate. I unfolded the note inside.
