International Law

Blind Candidate Passes Bar Exam for First Time

The Korea Times, taking a break from its riveting 467-part series on “national branding”, caught up to other media outlets including the Law Times and the Chosun Ilbo in reporting the achievement of 27 year-old Choi Young in passing the bar examination’s two-stage written portion. If he passes the oral interview part of the qualification process, Choi will enroll in the Judicial Research and Training Institute (JRTI) to receive two years of official practical tutoring in how to operate the nation’s judicial apparatuses.

Choi is the first blind person in the history of the bar examination to pass the written test. After petitioning the Ministry of Justice for accommodations for his disability—and offering the precedent of Japan having allowed non-sighted candidates to receive extra time and audio assistance (since they can’t read)—Choi was allowed to take the examination. Previously, non-sighted candidates operated under the disadvantage of not being able to see the examination papers.

Here the Korea Times gets a little ahead of itself, saying that Choi will be a lawyer if he passes the interview. That’s not correct—the two-year JRTI course, which is admittedly pretty hard to fail, given that the students are all extremely talented—is a prerequisite to admission to the bar. So if he passes the oral interview (results will be known on Tuesday the 28th, and are sure to be reported) Choi will be looking for work as a lawyer around December 2010.

Korea has heretofore not been a particularly disability-friendly society. Last year, a proposed anti-discrimination law stumbled over its inclusion of homosexuality as a protected class, and so there’s still no express anti-discrimination statute here, and no analogue to the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) requiring reasonable accommodations for disabled persons like Choi.

What’s interesting to me is that the Korean legal profession, because it pays well while not being particularly physically-demanding, has traditionally always had an overrepresentation of people with physical deformities (club foot, strawberry mark on the face, etc.). The amount of time, and intense focus, required to adequately prepare for the bar examination has tended to select for nerd and/or klutz qualities (ask me about my two years playing tee-ball!)—getting bullied or excluded, and wanting to “get even” (success is the best revenge) or to “be somebody”, has prompted a lot of young Koreans to really study hard for that exam. It’s surprising to me that until now, there hasn’t been any blind guy.

One detail of the story that’s not in the Korea Times, but which I found in the Chosun version (good human-interest reporting!), is that Choi gets by with the help of friends (you know there’s a good woman among those “friends") and hard-working, self-sacrificing parents working as day laborers in a countryside town. It’s a poor-kid-overcoming-every-obstacle story, the kind everyone likes. As for me, I’m rooting for Choi and would look forward to working with him. I hope on the 28th to be noting his success at passing the oral interview.

Full post as published by Korea Law Blog on October 23, 2008 (boomark / email).