EDITORIAL - Starting ’em young

At least someone got punished for this scandal. For leaking questions in mercantile law in the Bar examinations last year, a lawyer has been disbarred and a senior partner in a law firm has been reprimanded by the Supreme Court. In this land where people with the right connections can get away with murder, the punishment is all the more surprising because the leak originated from Balgos & Perez, a law firm where one of the senior partners is former justice se-cretary Hernando Perez, still a leading light in the ruling Lakas-Christian Muslim Democrats party.

It must be emphasized that the principal culprit in the leak, as determined by the Supreme Court, resigned early on from the law firm. The culprit, lawyer Danilo de Guzman, admitted downloading the questions from the computer of his boss, Bar examiner Marcial Balgos, and giving copies to his Beta Sigma Lambda fraternity brothers. De Guzman’s lame excuse was that he thought the questions were for a quiz in a book Balgos might be preparing. The Supreme Court did not buy that, but believed Balgos was unaware that his office computer where he stored the questions was networked with other computers in the office. For being clueless, Balgos received a reprimand from the high court.

The liability in this scandal could still grow wider as more people are included in the investigation. In the meantime, the public can only worry about the extent of cheating in Bar examinations. Certain quarters have proposed a review of a system where too much weight is given on the Bar exams instead of overall performance in four years of pre-law and another four years of law school. Because of this emphasis on the Bar, excelling in the exams has become a matter of pride for certain schools and, as we have seen in the case of De Guzman, for certain fraternities. Such fraternity ties extend to actual law practice, where even prosecutors and justices coddle "brods" accused of murdering young men in insane hazing rituals.

This is not the first time that the Bar exams have been marred by the leakage of test questions. When law graduates learn early that cheating pays, moving on to corruption in actual law practice is an easy leap. No wonder there is so much rot in the judiciary.