"If the introduction of the law school system has brought about such a massive spike in the legal population, shouldn’t the number of judges have increased by that same margin?"
Confronted with this thoroughly common-sense and rational question, the reality of the judiciary lowers its head in shame. The natural proportional formula you have pointed out shattered miserably at the very gates of the court. The bleak reality is this: while the number of lawyers flooding the market exploded, the number of judges inside the courts remained practically frozen, tightly shackled by the law.
We have multiplied the number of soldiers armed with combat skills into the tens of thousands, yet we left the number of arbiters tasked with breaking up the brawl and delivering verdicts completely untouched. This grotesque imbalance is the definitive culprit that relegated young judges to "workers in a verdict factory" and fueled the court to become a machine that peers exclusively at paperwork instead of truth. Why on earth was such a deformed dam constructed in the first place?
The Number Choking the Judiciary: The Curse of the "Quota Act"
The court cannot decide on its own how many judges it will employ. This is because a rigid statute enacted by the legislature—the Act on the Quotas of Judges at Courts of All Levels—acts as a shackle, capping the maximum number of judicial seats.
Since the inception of the law school system, roughly 1,700 new attorneys have been churned out every year. Compared to the past, the aggregate number of lawyers has exploded dozens of times over. To survive, and capitalized by the public’s lowered threshold for legal access, these expanded forces of lawyers manufacture countless lawsuits and cases, channeling them straight into the throat of the court.
Yet, the total statutory quota for judges tasked with absorbing this titanic wave of cases remained rigidly locked at 3,214 for years. To make matters worse, the actual number of active judges on the bench sits even lower, at around 3,000. The waterway has swollen into a torrential flood, yet the size of the dam receiving the water remains identical to what it was a decade ago.
The Weight of Taxes Needed to Add a Single Judge
The most secular and pragmatic reason why the parliament and the government refuse to revise the law to comfortably expand the bench boils down to one thing: money.
Lawyers are either self-employed business owners or employees of private law firms; the state is under no obligation to provide their salaries. Judges, however, are high-ranking public officials appointed and guaranteed status by the state. Adding a single judge does not merely imply dispensing a single individual’s annual salary. It requires a bundled investment of taxpayers’ money: judicial research officials (law clerks) to assist the judge in reviewing paperwork, court administrative staff, and the physical courtroom space and maintenance costs required to conduct trials.
From the perspective of the Ministry of Economy and Finance, which guards the national treasury, a wholesale expansion of judicial seats is a monumental fiscal burden. No matter how desperately the court pleaded that it was suffocating to death beneath the caseload, the threshold for budget allocations and statutory revisions has always remained icy and conservative.
The Talented Refuse the Robe: A System Turned Self-Sabotage
To make matters worse, an institutional contradiction has manifested where the court cannot recruit judges even when slots are available. The "Unification of the Legal Profession" system—which mandates that judges be selected only from practitioners with rich legal experience—has, paradoxically, choked the recruitment of the bench.
In the old days, if test scores were stellar, the state could immediately appoint a large cohort of fresh youths straight out of the Judicial Research and Training Institute as judges. Today, however, the state only courts individuals who have spent a minimum of five years proving their competence through the rough-and-tumble terrain of private practice.
The core problem is that the lawyers recognized as genuinely talented in the market have no desire to become judges. Ace attorneys enjoying astronomical salaries and sophisticated treatment at mega law firms feel zero attraction toward a judgeship—a position where their income will be slashed past a fraction of its size, where they must pull overnight shifts buried inside a graveyard of paperwork every single day, and where a single flawed verdict invites the doxxing and curses of the entire nation. Consequently, even when the court posts recruitment announcements to hire judges, it fails to fill the designated quotas, repeating a cycle of under-enrollment every year.
Guarding the Dam Amidst a Malformed Downpour
Ultimately, the post-law school judiciary has been screaming in agony amidst a grotesque imbalance of supply and demand. Thanks to the surge in lawyers, it became far easier for citizens to cross the legal threshold—but once past that threshold, the chambers of the judges waiting for them were already bursting at the seams, on the verge of detonation.
With a mere handful of judges blocking that downpour with their bare bodies, demanding that they possess "the breathing room to ponder the deep reality and wipe away the tears of a case" was an impossible luxury from the very beginning. The weapon they chose for survival was formalism and document-centrism. They were governed by a primal terror: if they did not look exclusively at the literal text written on the paperwork and strike it down mechanically, the entire system would paralyze and collapse.
Behind the sorrowful conclusion that "the law has no interest in reality" hides this deformed failure of a state apparatus—one that multiplied the soldiers but starved the generals to death. The icy glare of a judiciary turning away from the truth might well be nothing other than the exhausted eyes of judges, silently screaming for rescue from within a mounting grave of paperwork.
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