Strip ABA Accrediting Power

[Armando Ramos]

Article tries to make it about "diversity," but the correct issue is the highlighted word "cartel." As noted by the US Justice Department, "The ABA’s cartel-like control over law school accreditation drives up costs, limits access, and pushes ridiculous ideological mandates over merit"

Trump admin moves to strip ABA accrediting power

The Trump administration is taking the first step toward stripping the American Bar Association of its longtime authority to accredit law schools, escalating its campaign against liberal ideological influence in higher education.

The Education Department on Friday recommended that the ABA no longer be recognized as an accreditor, The Wall Street Journal reported.

The recommendation is backed by a nearly 500-page department report compiled over more than a year.

The ABA reviews nearly 200 law schools nationwide, giving it significant influence over legal education.

Accreditation affects schools' access to federal student loan programs, while most states require graduates to attend an ABA-approved law school to qualify for the bar exam.

David Barker, assistant secretary of education, told the Journal that the administration believes the accreditation system has allowed organizations to impose ideological priorities on schools.

"We have said many times that accreditation, in general, operates like a cartel," Barker said. "When there's no competition, accreditors feel free to inject their own political preferences, their own ideologies into the work that they do."

The Education Department report also contends that the ABA's accreditation arm isn't sufficiently independent of the broader organization or the legal profession, according to the Journal.

The move follows a lengthy fight over the ABA's diversity policies.

Standard 206 required law schools to demonstrate "concrete action" toward diversity and inclusion among students, faculty, and staff.

The ABA suspended enforcement of the requirement in February 2025 and subsequently extended that suspension.

Bloomberg Law reported earlier this month that the ABA's House of Delegates cleared the way for its independent accreditation council to eliminate Standard 206 after the council had already voted to repeal it.

The Trump administration and other conservatives have argued the standard encouraged race- and sex-based preferences.

Then-Attorney General Pam Bondi warned the ABA in February 2025 that its accreditation authority could be revoked. The ABA maintained that the suspended rule was not being enforced and said its accreditation council operates independently.

The administration's move Friday does not immediately end the ABA's authority.

The Education Department's recommendation will go to a panel that reviews accrediting organizations before a final recommendation is made to Undersecretary of Education Nicholas Kent. The process could take months.

Melissa Hart, chair of the ABA's Accreditation Council, told the Journal that the council is confident it complies with federal requirements and remains focused on producing "competent, ethical attorneys."

If the ABA ultimately loses federal recognition, university-affiliated law schools could rely on their universities' accreditors, while independent law schools would have to find alternatives.

[Harrison J Bounel]

The ABA Is a Joke. So Why Is It Still Accrediting Law Schools?

By Sarah Parshall Perry
April 27, 2026 6:30 AM

Restoring law school neutrality requires ending the ABA’s accreditation monopoly.

The American Bar Association’s monopoly over the accreditation of U.S. law schools has long been defended as essential to maintaining excellence in the legal profession. As the sole federally recognized accreditor whose approval is required for bar eligibility in nearly every state in the country, the ABA exercises monolithic influence over legal education and, by extension, the judiciary and the bar. But this authority rests on an implicit premise of institutional neutrality, a premise that no longer holds — if it ever did at all.

In our work to secure a high-quality, value-neutral education for every American student from preschool through graduate school,
Defending Education has recently released a report identifying the myriad ways that the American Bar Association is unfit to continue in its role of overseeing American legal education.

What are they, you ask? Let us count them.

For starters, the ABA doesn’t represent a majority — or even a plurality — of American lawyers. In fact, its membership represents a paltry 11–12 percent of actively practicing lawyers. As of last count, the ABA itself notes that as of January 2024, while there are 1,322,649 active lawyers in the U.S., only about 150,000 are active ABA members. That kind of skeletal representation could be a function of the ABA’s having taken positions on a multitude of legal issues that reveal a consistently leftward tilt. For example, America First Legal recently noted that over the past decade, at least 80 percent of the ABA’s Supreme Court amicus briefs advanced progressive outcomes, with none supporting conservative legal positions. The ABA has, for example, consistently argued for the losing perspective on abortion, gender identity, gun control, and affirmative action. It has even gone so far as to argue that the Equal Rights Amendment was ratified — a position so untenable that even the Department of Justice and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg laughed it off.

That doesn’t just make the American Bar Association a progressive advocacy organization masquerading as a neutral membership organization; it makes them bad lawyers.

The ABA’s ratings of federal judicial nominees have also long exhibited demonstrable inconsistency when applied to conservative candidates. Empirical studies spanning multiple administrations, including analyses published in Political Research Quarterly, document a pattern: Republican nominees receive lower ratings than Democratic nominees with comparable credentials. During both the first and second Trump administrations, for example, numerous well-qualified conservative nominees received “not qualified” ratings, indicating that rather than relying on objective peer assessments to determine judicial fitness, the ABA’s Standing Committee on the Federal Judiciary is instead applying de facto ideological filters.

Then there are the ABA’s skewed legal-education mandates. Its standard 303© requires every accredited law school to provide all students with education on “bias, cross-cultural competency, and racism” at the beginning of their studies and again before graduation. Framed as professional development, this requirement effectively compels “racial sensitivity” training as a condition of accreditation — something that has absolutely no bearing on the suitability of a law student to practice law. And for years, ABA Standard 206 required “concrete action” to promote diversity in student bodies, faculties, and staff with respect to race, ethnicity, and gender — a regulation that imposed race- and sex-based quotas in violation of federal civil rights and constitutional law. Even after the Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (2023) rendered such practices constitutionally suspect, the ABA maintained these standards until political and legal pressure forced a temporary suspension until August 2026.

But a suspension is not a revocation, and a revocation is what’s needed.

Lastly, the ABA’s House of Delegates has repeatedly endorsed resolutions advancing specific positions on divisive cultural issues, from abortion to gender identity to racial equity and beyond. Whatever one’s views on these subjects, they are matters of legitimate democratic disagreement, and by adopting progressive opinions as official policy, the ABA has transformed from professional association to political agitprop, using its accreditation leverage to shape the next generation of lawyers in its image.

Because most states condition bar admission on graduation from an ABA-accredited school, and because federal student aid flows to those institutions, the ABA effectively controls a law student’s prospects of being professionally licensed. That control undermines public confidence in the independence of the judiciary and the bar. Texas and Florida have already divested the ABA of its accreditation status for their state bar’s eligibility. But when the ABA’s accreditation approval is up for review this summer, the Department of Education should go further and defenestrate the association, unblocking its federal chokehold on legal education and the practice of law.

The legal profession thrives when it remains committed to rigorous analysis and fidelity to the rule of law, not to a political agenda. Restoring law school neutrality requires ending the ABA’s accreditation monopoly.

The profession, the academy, and the public deserve better.