A renowned scholar of constitutional law has been accused of leaking questions for this year's bar exam to one of his female students. Because those who serve as judges, public prosecutors or lawyers have the duty of meting out justice and fairness in society, the bar exam that they must pass must be free from any doubt or suspicion. Leaking questions for the exam is a grave betrayal of the trust both test applicants and ordinary citizens have in the bar exam system and in the nation's legal profession. While prosecutors should fully investigate this case and expose what has happened, the government, the judiciary and other parties concerned should make serious efforts to regain the people's trust by devising effective measures to prevent anything like this from happening again.

Koichi Aoyagi, a professor at Meiji University's law school with more than 20 books published, was one of 132 experts appointed by the government to create questions for this year's bar exam, which was held in May and whose successful applicants were announced in early September. As the chief of a group of 13 experts in charge of preparing questions about the Constitution, he was closely involved in crafting questions for both the essay and computer-graded parts of the test concerning the Constitution, grading answers and deciding on applicants' success or failure. He thus was able to see questions prepared by other examiners.

Suspicions of the leak surfaced when examiners noticed that a woman in her 20s wrote answers "in a way that couldn't have been written without access to certain information."