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The American Bar Association has held a monopoly over legal education in this country since 1952. Every law school in America that wants its graduates to sit for the bar exam must be accredited by the ABA. That single point of control has given one left-wing organization the power to shape the ideological formation of every lawyer in the United States, and they have used that power aggressively.
Thankfully, the Trump administration is now moving to end it.
The Department of Education has released a nearly five-hundred-page report concluding that the ABA’s accreditation council is not sufficiently independent of the broader organization as federal regulations require. What’s more, they are recommending that the ABA lose its status as the sole federally recognized accreditor of American law schools. Assistant Secretary of Education David Barker has likened accreditation to operating like a cartel. This recommendation will now work its way through a review panel before reaching the Undersecretary of Education for a final decision.
The ABA’s DEI accreditation standards are at the heart of the fight. For years, the ABA has required law schools to demonstrate diversity, equity, and inclusion compliance as a condition of maintaining accreditation. They have effectively forced every American law school to adopt progressive ideology or risk losing the credential their students need to practice law. Attorney General Pam Bondi demanded those standards be eliminated early in the administration. The DOJ has barred its attorneys from speaking at or attending ABA events. And the ABA’s longtime role in vetting federal judicial nominees has been stripped away entirely.
The American Bar Association has gone far beyond its accreditation function. It is now a left-wing activist organization that has sued to challenge Trump executive orders, passed resolutions condemning conservative policies, and used its institutional prestige to advance a thoroughly leftist legal agenda. Florida’s Supreme Court has already ruled that ABA accreditation is no longer required for law schools in that state, and we hope many will follow.
When one organization controls who becomes a lawyer in America, and that organization has an explicit ideological agenda, the result is a legal profession systematically tilted against half of the country. Breaking that monopoly is not an attack on the legal profession — it’s a defense of the people that profession is supposed to serve.
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