In an old joke repeated by the head of a prestigious law school in El Salvador, this question is posed by a jobless lawyer to a high government official who owes him a favor.

The public image of El Salvador's courst is improving, but critics still claim to see cracks in the institution's structure.

Like all durable jokes, this one contains a germ of truth. For Emma Dinorah Bonilla de Alvear, who heads the law school at the Universidad Centroamericana José Simeón Cañas in San Salvador, it encapsulates a shameful legacy that she and her colleagues must constantly fight to overcome as they train a new generation of lawyers and future jurists. “In the past—although we had some very well prepared judges—the truth is that judges were appointed for almost any reason other than their qualifications,” she says.

The stereotype of judges as recipients of political favor has deep roots in many Latin American societies. In El Salvador it begins with the justice of the peace, a local official who traditionally represents the first and, for many people, the only contact with the judicial system. Until recently, justices of the peace in El Salvador did not have to be lawyers or have any particular legal training. This is not necessarily bad; in many countries untrained justices of the peace have a distinguished tradition of providing basic legal services to people in remote areas. But in El Salvador, the appointment process for these officials had become so blatantly politicized that the position had lost much of its traditional prestige.

Upper court judges did have to be lawyers, but they were appointed for short terms and promoted at the sole discretion of the Supreme Court. This would not necessarily have been a problem, except that the Supreme Court was replaced in its entirety by each new government. Candidates for the court were handpicked by the executive or by its allies and required only a simple majority for confirmation in the Legislative Assembly. “All this led to a profound lack of trust in the judiciary that continues to this day,” says Rafael Durán Barranza, president of El Salvador’s National Judicial Council. “People don’t trust judges, they don’t trust Supreme Court justices, they don’t even trust lawyers.”

A basis for trust. Some of the most radical reforms pushed through by El Salvador’s assembly were intended to restore public faith in the integrity and capacity of judges and other key officials in the judicial sector.

First, the assembly took steps to end the judiciary’s financial and political subservience to the executive branch. It enforced a constitutional amendment that requires 6 percent of El Salvador’s national revenues to be set aside for the judiciary’s operating budget every year—one of the highest levels in Latin America. In addition to protecting the judiciary from financial interference, this gave the courts a predictable budget which enabled them to raise salaries across the board, invest in training and new facilities, and pay for the costs of administrative modernization and subsequent reforms.

A second law strengthened the National Judicial Council, which was conceived as a counterweight to the administrative power concentrated in the Supreme Court. As in many Latin American countries, El Salvador’s Supreme Court performs a number of functions, such as selecting and promoting judges and admitting or disbarring lawyers, that can create glaring conflicts of interest.

The judicial council was designed to take over some of these functions and to represent the interests of other professionals in the judicial sector. It is made up of six representatives elected by law schools, practicing lawyer’s associations and the government ministry that houses public prosecutors and public defenders.

Today the council is the gatekeeper for entry to the judicial career. The first rung in a judicial career—the local justice of the peace—is now only accessible to lawyers who pass exams and attend training programs run by the council. The council also selects lists of candidates for court appointments and promotions, evaluates the performance of judges accused of malpractice or corruption and runs a professional judicial school (see article "How much for the law degree?").

Finally, the Legislative Assembly overhauled the process for appointing justices to the Supreme Court. To limit ties with the government in power, the court’s 15 justices now serve nine-year terms. Every three years one-third of the justices comes up for election. The executive and legislative branches no longer have a role in nominating candidates. Instead, two lists of possible candidates are drawn up: one by the National Judicial Council and one by a national election open to all the country’s practicing lawyers. The highest-ranking candidates from each list are then merged into a single list that is presented to the assembly, which must confirm five of them with a two-thirds (instead of a simple) majority.

Has it worked? The new appointment procedures were put to a dramatic test in 1994 when they were applied for the first time to all 15 seats on the Supreme Court. The selection process was highly charged. Several incumbent justices (all of whom had been appointed during the civil war) ran vociferous public campaigns to retain their seats. But the first postwar assembly, which included a block of newly elected delegates for the FMLN, was much more diverse than its predecessors. In the end, not one of the 15 incumbent justices received enough votes to win confirmation.

Even more remarkable was the fact that none of the new justices was accused of incompetence or past corruption. An estimated 75 percent of the nation’s lawyers had voted in the election, and the top candidates on the list who went to the assembly were widely regarded as reputable professionals. “This was an enormous advance, based on a process that is infinitely superior to the old one,” says Francisco Díaz Rodríguez, a member of the National Judicial Council who until recently headed fespad, a prominent legal research and advocacy organization in San Salvador.

The new Supreme Court threw itself into the implementation of several pending reforms and began to assert its independence in matters of law (see article "Who wrote these laws?"). People started speaking of the courts as an emerging axis of power in the country. The political class, which had never paid much attention to the judiciary in the days when it was entirely subservient, suddenly took an interest in the appointment process. In 1997, when one-third of the seats on the court came up for renewal, the talk in the assembly was of “reparto,” or the tradition whereby political parties agree behind close doors to divide up key positions based on the candidates’ political affiliations. “There was much more pressure, more maneuvering and more vetoes” of candidates by political parties that time around, says Díaz.

The reemergence of political pressure is evident in other areas of the justice system as well. As part of the reforms, El Salvador’s attorney general (whose appointment also requires two-thirds confirmation in the assembly) was given much greater power to investigate wrongdoing by private and public officials (see article "I'll see you in court!". Salvadorans were stunned, for example, when the first attorney general to exercise these powers successfully jailed several members of the National Civil Police for fabricating evidence in the high-profile case of a murdered journalist. But when that attorney general’s term expired last July, the assembly failed to renew his mandate and went into a protracted round of negotiations over who should succeed him. As of late October, the position was still vacant.

Many observers viewed the delay as proof that the executive and the assembly are not comfortable with a strong and independent attorney general. “To me, it’s evidence of a process of counter-reform,” says Benjamín Cuéllar Martínez, director of a well-known human rights institute in San Salvador.

Lorena Peña, an assembly delegate for the FMLN, is also concerned: “We think that when key positions are decided by ‘reparto,’ you’ve started on the path to corruption.” But she also blames her own party for not taking the time to carefully review the credentials of judicial candidates. “You can’t get a two-thirds majority in this assembly without the FMLN,” she says. “We have contributed to some mistakes.”

Her admission reveals one of the paradoxes of the reform process. Salvadorans will only begin to trust their judicial officials when citizens themselves, through their representatives in the assembly, exercise the vigilance necessary to keep the selection process clean.