[Lim Woong] Old habits linger on in high places

The tension began in January, when the judicial council that screens candidates put forward four names to serve on the Supreme Court.

By custom, the chief justice and the Blue House are supposed to consult and settle on a final nominee. But the two offices remained deadlocked for months; in March, the retiring justice left the bench with no successor.

On Aug. 18, Chief Justice Jo Hee-de broke with custom and nominated one of the stalled candidates in writing; 10 days later, the Blue House refused to appoint the nominee and demanded a different name.

Jo then met the president face-to-face and said nothing, only to announce his refusal the next day, just as the president flew out for the UN General Assembly. The ruling side erupted. Pundits called it a snub, an insult to the presidency, one more sign that an old judge holds the elected leader in contempt.

The fury, though, did not come out of nowhere. Two older wounds had been smoldering. After President Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law in December 2024, Jo reportedly called the move unconstitutional, then went quiet the next morning and said almost nothing in public afterward.

When a lower court later released Yoon from detention pending his insurrection trial, the head of the judiciary again offered no clear statement. Then, just before the 2025 presidential election, Lee Jae Myung's own election-law case before the Supreme Court was referred to the full bench through what critics allege was an irregular shortcut and was decided with startling speed on a record of some 70,000 pages.

The opposition's theory was blunt: The court had tried to knock the front-runner, Lee Jae Myung, out of the race. Jo denies all of it, and neither charge has been proven. Yet the suspicions spread easily and refused to go away. In fact, such doubts tend to fade only through open, patient explanation.

What Korea got instead was pure formality: A written denial here, a procedural defense there, and silence in between. Each stiff answer from the court seemed to feed the very doubt it was meant to clear. In public life, rigidity is often read as concealment.

The Constitution states only that justices are appointed by the president upon the chief justice's nomination; it says little about renomination or how to break deadlocks. For decades, the public had taken the traditional photo op — both offices sitting down together — for granted. This time, each side waved the same document at the other: The presidency insisted on its power to appoint, the chief justice on his power to nominate, and both treated the Constitution's quiet spots as a political shield. Nobody lied, exactly. Nobody negotiated, either.

Set aside the robes and the legal talking points, and what remains is a scene Koreans know from their own offices, schools and homes: A senior figure, cornered and aggrieved, doubling down on procedure. He invokes rank, cites the rulebook, answers questions with regulations and mistakes the resulting silence for respect. Koreans have a word for this figure: “kkondae,” the old hand whose authority must never be questioned and whose stubbornness gets rebranded as backbone.

Our culture has long tended to confuse stubbornness with strength. We praise a leader who holds his ground, who never bends, who stares down opposition, as if hardheadedness were a form of courage. Children seem to absorb the lesson early. The student who argues with the teacher comes across as rude; the employee who pushes back on the director seems to have an attitude problem.

Here is the distinction this country keeps failing to draw: Resolve and stubbornness are not the same trait wearing different clothes. Resolve holds to a principle while keeping the door open; stubbornness closes the door and calls the lock a principle. A leader with resolve can tell the president no, then walk over, sit down and explain that no for an hour. Jo's refusal of the renomination demand may well have been procedurally correct, but the manner of the refusal has ironically turned what should have been a serious disagreement between adults into a childish squabble.

Roger Fisher and William Ury put the remedy plainly in their book "Getting to Yes": Separate the people from the problem, and bargain over interests rather than positions. A position is a wall; an interest is a door.

Both men in this fight, it seems to me, were all wall. Had either asked what the other actually needed (the presidency's need to be consulted rather than notified, the court's need to be seen as independent rather than embattled), the standoff might have produced a settlement both could live with. Instead, each treated the other as an obstacle to be outranked.

The deeper trouble is that much of Korea's notion of strong leadership was forged in an era that no longer exists. In a country rebuilding from war and poverty, where factories needed discipline and dissent looked like disorder, a stern, unmoving leader was an asset. Today's problems refuse to surrender to sternness. They yield, slowly and only sometimes, to conversation, give-and-take, mutual respect and a genuine tolerance for people who see the world differently.

The leaders Korea needs now are probably not the ones who never budge but the ones who know exactly which lines cannot budge and then handle everything else like a negotiation rather than a siege. Holding firm on principle while staying flexible in manner is not weakness. It may be the hardest skill in today's leadership.

I grew up watching men like the chief justice and believing their intransigence was strength. The teacher who never apologized, the executive who never explained himself, the elder whose word was final: I mistook it all for authority and practiced my own small version of it.

Age has taught me what the rule book never did. A closed door, I suspect, protects nothing but the pride of the man who shut it. The leaders I remember with gratitude were not those who never moved an inch, but those who stood firm while making room for me at the table — listening, offering alternatives and, most importantly, making me feel we were solving the problem, not making each other the problem.

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Lim Woong

Lim Woong is a professor at the Graduate School of Education at Yonsei University in Seoul. The views expressed here are the writer’s own. — Ed.