In a courtroom in Seoul, a judge has placed a price on the ruins of a building that once embodied the fragile hope of reconciliation between two nations still technically at war. The Inter-Korean Liaison Office, demolished by Pyongyang in June 2020 amid a spiral of provocation and grievance, has now been valued at $32.5 million in damages — the first time South Korea has sought direct legal redress from the North Korean state. The ruling is less a mechanism of collection than a formal inscription of wrongdoing into the historical record, a gesture of accountability made in the full knowledge t