The Legal Implications of Korean Sports Violence

Korean national laws may have limited application in the sports sector. Sports rules that restrain government intervention have allowed organizations to exercise power as autonomous and private sectors at the global level (Kim, 2011). Despite these constraints, certain issues, including criminal problems, economic interests, and bodily integrity in sports, sometimes call for intervention from judicial powers (Park, 2016). As it is impossible to completely avoid physical contact in team sports games, acts of violence that have high chances of harming others naturally take place during games and competitive events. Thus, this paper seeks to define whether violence in sports is subject to criminal prosecution. After a descriptive exploration of pre-existing studies through a systematic literature review, qualitative research was conducted to examine the precedents in accordance with legal transition and flow. Legal concepts in Korea were first established, and key points of previous works and studies were examined thoroughly (Sohn, 2011). It is critical to judge the intentionality of such actions for a legal interpretation to see whether they can be deemed offensive (Sohn, 2011). As the concept of violence is defined as a physical assault on bodies, illegally exercised physical coercion, and invasion of other people’s bodies, thus validating such action as a crime, the benefit and protection of law to be honored in such incidents are bodily integrity and its physiological functions (Oh, 2019). In order to decide criminality under penal law, each case consists of the “component validity-illegality-obligation” (Yeon et al., 2018).