According to Rafael Durán Barranza, president of El Salvador’s National Judicial Council, that is how one veteran Salvadoran jurist announced his views while the draft of a new criminal code was still being debated.

That reaction points to one of the most nettlesome aspects of judicial reform programs: the unwillingness and inability of existing practitioners to change their ways. In El Salvador, the resistance was understandable. First, there were legitimate philosophical disagreements over the government’s chosen approach to reform. Second, the new criminal procedures resulted in a significant transfer of authority from judges and the police to prosecutors and defenders (see article "I'll see you in court!"). For judges, attorneys in any capacity, and for the police, the reform also implied the need to learn and correctly apply a large new body of substantive and procedural law, with little or no time off to prepare. “When people have been working one way for many years, this is very hard,” says José Albino Tinetti, director of the Judicial School run by the National Judicial Council.

Knowing that training would be critical to the success of the reform program, in the late 1980s the government began bringing foreign jurists to San Salvador to give seminars on trends in judicial reform. “The goal was simply to put us in touch with new ways of thinking,” recalls Tinetti. Constitutional reforms passed in 1991 placed what was then an embryonic judicial school under the National Judicial Council and charged it with developing a systematic approach to training judges, prosecutors, defenders, and the police.

At the time, the very idea of a judicial school was considered radical. “In the past there had never been any kind of training for judges,” says Durán. Today, the Judicial School is one of the most advanced institutions of its kind in Latin America. It offers an array of courses and workshops on matters ranging from constitutional theory to techniques for making effective oral presentations. Students are able to conduct mock arraignments and trials and view videos that show how the new judicial procedures are applied to an array of typical crimes, among other things.

These courses are widely praised by professionals who have taken them. But limited funds mean that only a small percentage of all the country’s judicial professionals, mainly in the capital area, have been able to attend. Although the school publishes manuals and is working on an Internet training network, many judicial officials in the country’s poor rural interior complain that they have been left to sink or swim.

It starts in law school. Some critics of the reform argue that inadequate education and training will ultimately doom the whole effort. Felipe Umaña, a legal adviser to El Salvador’s National Association of Private Enterprises, uses the new category of environmental crimes as an example. “This kind of crime requires sophisticated examination of scientific evidence of things like airborne contaminants, but our judges are completely unprepared to do this,” he says.

Beatrice Alamanni de Carrillo, president of the Federation of Salvadoran Lawyers Associations and a former law school dean at the Universidad Centroamericana José Simeón Cañas (UCA), makes an even bleaker assessment. “The problems of the judicial system begin in university classrooms,” she says. She claims that second-rate law schools have proliferated in El Salvador in recent years, and that they graduate many more lawyers than the country can absorb. Even the few reputable law schools offer what she calls a purely technical approach to the law. “There is almost no emphasis on the humanistic culture and learning that students will need to properly interpret the law. They merely learn how to apply it—and poorly.”

Emma Dinorah Bonilla de Alvear, current head of UCA’s law school, agrees that universities need to work on developing students’ “critical faculties.” But she says law schools are also under pressure to update their curricula so that students have at least a basic ability to work with the new codes and procedures. Classes that might have been devoted to humanistic studies are instead being used to teach oral procedures, for example.

Alamanni de Carrillo and others also warn that the minimum requirements to practice law in El Salvador are far too low. “Students begin studying law at age 16 or 17 and graduate at 21 or 22. There is no bar exam. They simply present their degree to the Supreme Court and get authorized to practice law. Putting the lives of citizens in the hands of these youths strikes me as gravely irresponsible.” Alamanni de Carrillo claims part of the blame for this situation rests with lawyers themselves, who have resisted initiatives to require membership by all lawyers in a single, self-governing bar association. “We lawyers need to learn to manage our own profession, to set standards and even to purge our own ranks,” she says.