A cold hallway in the Seoul Family Court, the scent of stale coffee and fear. Lee Yeonwoo, a seventeen-year-old with a scar across his knuckles and a file thicker than most adults', sits in the defendant's chair. He is not here for theft or truancy. He is here because the law he faces — Juvenile Law — was written to protect kids, but the system that enforces it has already decided he is not a kid. He is a case number. A statistic. A problem to be disposed of.

His public defender, Kang Seonah, is a woman who burned out of corporate law years ago and now carries the dead-end cases nobody else wants. She has seen kids like Yeonwoo before: violent, sullen, unreachable. But when she digs into his file, the story that emerges is not delinquency. It is a survival manual. A mother who disappeared. A father whose temper left hospital records. A school that expelled him for fighting back. And the incident that landed him in cuffs — a brutal assault on a classmate — starts to look less like a crime and more like the only move left to someone who has never been protected by anyone. Seonah has weeks before the hearing. The prosecution wants him tried as an adult. And Yeonwoo, who has never trusted an adult in his life, must decide whether the woman sitting across the table is his last chance or just another person who will let him down.

Also known as: Juvenile Law, 소년법, Sonyeonbeop, Boy Law.