Making certain that our law schools educate the best and brightest people who want to be lawyers is a noble cause. Those charged with that responsibility help ensure that our citizenry is protected from fraudulent lawyers and that the rule of law is enforced.
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Unfortunately, the American Bar Association (ABA), which has taken on law school accreditation, has earned the public’s disdain, and with good reason:
The Trump administration announced Friday it is moving forward with dismantling the American Bar Association’s (ABA) stranglehold on U.S. law schools, which allowed the organization to force left-wing ideologies on legal education at the threat of revoking accreditation.
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‘We have said many times that accreditation, in general, operates like a cartel,’ Assistant Secretary of Education David Barker said, according to The Wall Street Journal. ‘When there’s no competition, accreditors feel free to inject their own political preferences, their own ideologies into the work that they do.’
In 1921, the American Bar Association decided it was best qualified to establish accreditation standards for law schools. In principle, it was probably a good idea for an organization to set purely educational standards so that the public could trust that a lawyer it hired was qualified to do the job.
The ABA created the “Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar,” which is ostensibly separate from other ABA business, to manage accreditation. However, over the last several years, critics have charged that the panel violates independent status by taking orders from the ABA, which mandates that schools ignore basic civil rights principles to earn accreditation. The Department of Education recently published an 86-page report describing these violations and recommending that the ABA’s accreditation power be revoked.
Two notorious attacks on law colleges were on George Mason Law School (now called Antonin Scalia Law School) and St. Thomas University School of Law.
The George Mason Law School’s accreditation because it didn’t follow the ABA process for showing favoritism in recruiting minorities. St. Thomas’s accreditation because the law school adopted standards based on its Catholic affiliation (which could, according to the ABA, show bias against other religions).
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Another problem is that the federal government has required student loan applicants to attend an ABA-accredited school, or else get a private loan, which could be more costly.
Due to these abuses, the Trump administration argues that the ABA monopoly :
So, what’s to be done? Simply put, the ABA’s Council of the Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar must lose its monopoly on law school accreditation. To that end, state supreme courts in Florida, Texas, Ohio, Alabama, and other jurisdictions have changed their own policies so that someone sitting for the bar exam in those states no longer needs to have graduated from an ABA-accredited law school. If other states maintain the requirement that students must have graduated from an ABA-accredited law school (or from a school whose accreditor requires discriminatory policies), Congress should consider reducing or eliminating relevant federal funds to those states.
You might recall that recently the Supreme Court that the Constitution must be colorblind:
To that end, states and the federal government have passed laws and taken other actions to ensure that all Americans are treated equally, especially in higher education. But the ABA, using its accrediting authority, has sought to undermine these constitutional commitments to equal treatment regardless
of race. As a result, the federal government and states must continue to take actions to end the ABA’s monopolistic status as a law school accreditor.
The American Bar Association has abused its power and outlived its usefulness as an accrediting organization. In the near future, let’s hope that other organizations will step in to fill this important role in protecting our citizens and the rule of law.
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