Nearly six years after North Korea reduced a shared diplomatic facility in Kaesong to rubble, a South Korean court has formally declared the act a legal wrong and ordered compensation — translating a moment of geopolitical rupture into the language of civil liability. The liaison office, opened in 2018 as a rare physical expression of inter-Korean goodwill, was demolished in 2020 as diplomatic momentum collapsed and tensions surged. In asserting jurisdiction over its neighbor, South Korea's judiciary has done something courts rarely attempt across the world's most fortified border: named a sov