Bright-line statutory thresholds are supposed to be the rule of law's friend. They make outcomes predictable; they prevent judges from inventing thresholds at will. But brightness has a side effect: anyone who knows the line, and has the resources to engineer toward it, can engineer toward it.
The Kim Young-ran Act criminalizes graft above ₩1,000,000 per occurrence (and ₩3,000,000 per period). A senior official who receives a single ₩1,200,000 dinner is criminally exposed. The same official, receiving twelve ₩900,000 dinners over a year, is not — even though the cumulative entertainment is far higher and the corruption pattern more entrenched.
The Public Official Election Act creates an even cleaner pattern. Fines of ₩1,000,000 or above strip a winning candidate of their seat. Fines below do not. Look at the distribution of election-law verdicts on incumbent legislators and the cluster just below ₩1,000,000 — at ₩900,000, ₩800,000 — is statistically anomalous. Outsiders and first-time candidates show no such cluster.
This is not a story of judicial corruption. It is a story of how predictable rules respond to sophisticated counsel. The rules tell sophisticated defendants exactly where to land. They do not tell unsophisticated defendants the same thing — because unsophisticated defendants don't read the threshold-shaped landing zones. They just commit the offense and accept the verdict.