Kyong-Whan "Kenny" Ahn, ’85

*Director of the Public Law and Human Rights Law Center of the Faculty of Law at Seoul National University*

Kyong-Whan "Kenny" Ahn, ’85, was born in 1948, just three years after Korea gained its independence from Japan. Korea was facing a daunting challenge: creating a democracy from scratch after 35 years of Japanese rule.

It did not happen easily. After years of armed conflict, in 1960, when Ahn was 12, a student uprising overthrew the divided country’s autocratic government and brought about some democratic reforms. They were soon thwarted, however, by the military coup of General Park Chung-hee, which began a period of political repression lasting until his assassination in 1979.

Ahn joined the student activist movement that protested the repression of human rights and advocated for democracy. He completed his studies in law at Seoul National University in 1970 and enrolled in graduate law classes at the same university but "was indirectly forced to quit for being a critical activist," he says.

Ahn’s family suffered during these years. His father was imprisoned for political reasons and his mother left the home. She eventually moved away from Korea due to the political situation and settled in California.

In 1980, after working for a major corporation, Ahn enrolled in an LL.M. program at the University of Pennsylvania, studying corporate law in preparation for a career in business. Upon his graduation, he enrolled at Santa Clara Law.

Once there, Ahn changed his mind about his future. Mentored by Professor George Alexander and late Professor Russell Galloway, Ahn became interested in public interest law and worked for legal aid organizations.

He practiced law in the U.S. until 1987 when, he says, he returned to Korea "to be a part of Korean democratization."

In the intervening years, Korea’s struggle to become a democracy had been bloody. General Chun Doo-hwan had become president via a coup in 1980; student demonstrations that followed led to the Gwangju massacre, which left hundreds dead.

A year after Ahn’s return, in 1988, Korea finally had its first democratic elections, which established the current government, the Sixth Republic of Korea. It was not until 1992 that Korea elected its first civilian president, Kim Young-Sam.

Korea’s legal system was also built from scratch, incorporating aspects of Anglo-American law, European civil law, and Chinese concepts. Its constitution has been revised nine times since it was established in 1948.

Ahn has been part of this effort. As a scholar, he has gained expertise in Anglo-American Constitutional law, and has taught Constitutional Law, Anglo-American Law, Jurisprudence, Human Rights Law, Law and Politics, as well as Law and Literature (he is regarded as an expert on law and Shakespeare).

Ahn, who serves as dean and professor of law at Seoul National University, has served as vice president of the Korean Public Law Association and chairman of the Steering Committee of the People’s Solidarity for Participatory Democracy. He is currently president of the Korean Constitutional Law Association and of the Korean Anglo-American Law Association. He has translated many scholarly works into Korean, including Russell W. Galloway’s The Rich and the Poor in Supreme Court History (1983, published in Korean in 1985).

Not surprisingly, Ahn is also a committed scholar in the area of human rights, including the right to dissent, aliens’ rights under the U.S. law, and liberty and equality in Korea. He is founding director of the Public Law and Human Rights Law Center of his law school and is an advising jurist for the Asia-Pacific Forum for National Human Rights Institutions.

He has edited two books on human rights, Conscientious Objectors and Freedom of Assembly and Demonstration.

Though Ahn says he chose Santa Clara law primarily to be close to his mother, one wonders if the match were not more auspicious. "Until I was 10," says Ahn, "I was strictly raised in an extended family headed by my grandfather, a Confucian scholar and a landlord. I was one of his 14 grandsons. He showed us how to care for our neighbors. My father was the head of a high school. Until his premature death, my father led the keenest social-minded life." At Santa Clara Law, Ahn was able to build on the values he learned as a child. "Tolerance and a philanthropic mindset are the virtues I learned from Santa Clara," he says.

Published in Santa Clara Law, Fall 2006