The defendant's appeal is dismissed.

1. The summary of the grounds for appeal (definite or misunderstanding of legal principles) is that a limited liability company F (hereinafter “F”) occupied the instant apartment with the authority of theO, the former owner of the instant apartment, and thus, F’s possession of the instant apartment was lawful.

However, the victim who was awarded the bid of the apartment of this case infringed on the apartment without permission and illegally deprived of the F's possession.

Therefore, since the defendant, who is an employee of law firm G, delegated by F, committed an act as stated in the facts charged in order to restore F's possession, the defendant's act is not illegal as an act of self-help or a justifiable act exercising a right of self-help under the Civil Act

Nevertheless, the judgment of the court below which found the defendant guilty is erroneous in misconception of facts or misapprehension of legal principles.

2. Determination

A. The phrase “self-help act” as stipulated in Article 23 of the Criminal Act refers to an act in order to avoid the impossibility or significant difficulty of executing the claim in a case where it is impossible to preserve the claim by the statutory procedure. Thus, even in a case where the possession of the object in custody was deprived by a third party, it is possible to preserve the right by exercising the right to claim the return of the object in possession. Thus, it is difficult to view that the act of withdrawing possession with one’s own possession as a self-help act under the Criminal Act, barring any circumstances that are impossible or considerably difficult to exercise the

(see, e.g., Supreme Court Decision 2009Do8110, Nov. 24, 201). The former part of Article 209(2) of the Civil Act provides for the right to self-help regarding real estate, among the right to self-help, by stating that “In a case where the possession of real estate has been deprived of, the possessor may, if he/she was immediately deprived of the possession, return the real estate by excluding the perpetrator at the time of the deprivation.

Here, the term "on the job" is to recover possession by excluding the perpetrator as soon as possible objectively or according to the concept of society.