The Bar Association Has Lowered The Bar

The American Bar Association (ABA) accredits only specific law school programs and departments, not entire general undergraduate or multidisciplinary colleges. The issue is that it issues accreditation only to liberal colleges.

The Department of Education's accreditation staff has recommended revoking the American Bar Association's (ABA) monopoly, and there are valid reasons for this decision. Anyone who has observed ABA’s actions over the last few decades should have anticipated this outcome. Despite being under intense scrutiny, the ABA continues to act inappropriately. In its most recent filing with the U.S. Supreme Court, the ABA took the position that, although Congress passed a law permitting the indefinite detention of illegal alien felons prior to deportation, such a policy is unconstitutional.

Assistant Secretary David Barker explained:

Accreditation “operates like a cartel; when there’s no competition, accreditors feel free to inject their own political preferences, their own ideologies into the work that they do.”

The truth is, the ABA has become disgustingly political by still forcing race over merit. Its so called diversity mandate, Standard 206, required every accredited law school to demonstrate “concrete efforts” to achieve a diverse student body, faculty, and staff. Additionally, the ABA's training materials instructed site evaluators that simply reporting demographic statistics was insufficient.

In 2022, when the council revised Standard 206, its Standards Committee received comments warning that the standard “could lead to racial balancing or other practices inconsistent with the Equal Protection Clause,” which could be seen as an admission of potential illegality.

The ABA announced that the Supreme Court is set to review affirmative action. They indicated that if the legal standards regarding affirmative action change, Standard 206 will be revised accordingly.

However, that didn’t happen. After the Supreme Court ruling, the ABA kept enforcing the same standard, defying the highest court in the land. The training materials consistently instructed evaluators to focus on demanding "concrete efforts." The 2024–2025 materials repeated this guidance. The council placed Standard 206 on its committee agenda but took no action. It was not until February 2025, a full 20 months after the SFFA, that the standard was suspended.

Now, three years after the Supreme Court's ruling, and only because of pressure from a federal review, the repeal is finally in progress.

For 20 months following the Supreme Court’s ruling that race-conscious decision-making is illegal, the only federal authority overseeing American legal education evaluated law schools based on their racial initiatives. As a result, every law school dean who felt pressured to meet this standard was encouraged to take actions the Constitution prohibits, backed by an accrediting body that had already acknowledged this in writing.

When the council finally suspended Standard 206, it instructed its staff to remove potentially embarrassing questions from the site evaluations of four law schools.

At the same time, it issued guidance directing that complaints regarding Standard 206 should not be shared with the site teams at all; behavior that looks more like a cover-up than pursuing genuine reform.

Another Standard, 316, mandates that at least 75 percent of a law school’s graduates who take the bar exam must pass it within two years. This benchmark is the ABA’s primary measure of quality, which significantly affects the institution's viability. Department staff raised a straightforward question:

How did the council arrive at the 75 percent figure? The ABA said it referenced studies to support this number; however, it did not include those studies in its original petition or in its response to the draft analysis.

Hmmm

The pattern observed throughout the report is concerning. The ABA has been using the federal term "adverse action" in a way that deviates from its intended definition in federal regulations. Although it promised to revise its rules, it has not codified those changes in the governing document. Furthermore, the ABA has yet to demonstrate that its accreditation body is genuinely separate and independent from the ABA itself; the necessary bylaw changes to address this significant issue are still pending approval at an upcoming section business meeting this month.

These are not mere clerical issues. An accreditor that operates with unwritten standards and undocumented benchmarks exercises discretion in a manner that raises concerns about its history of viewpoint discrimination.

Unmentioned in the staff report, but significant nonetheless, is the troubling fact that the ABA claims to be a law school accreditor while failing to provide an accurate version of the U.S. Constitution.

The American Bar Association has behaved for decades like a factory for liberal lunatics

In August 2024, the ABA's House of Delegates declared the Equal Rights Amendment fully ratified as the 28th Amendment to the Constitution and called on the legal community, as well as all federal, state, local, territorial, and tribal governments, to implement it.

This position is unsubstantiated and indefensible. As a legal issue, the belief that the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) is part of the Constitution rests on conclusions rejected by the Office of Legal Counsel under both political parties and dismissed by the Archivist of the United States.

Every court that has examined this claim, including liberal-majority panels in the Ninth Circuit and the D.C. Circuit, has rejected it. This position is not legally defensible and demonstrates the American Bar Association's (ABA) tendency to prioritize political motives over the rule of law.

Get this, the ABA argues that removing its recognition could destabilize legal education. That argument is laughable. In January of this year, both Texas and Florida removed the exclusive requirement for ABA accreditation to qualify for bar admission, and their legal markets have remained stable.

Law schools affiliated with universities already possess regional accreditation. However, some independent law schools may need to pursue new accrediting bodies. This situation offers them an opportunity to encourage new competition.

Federal recognition is a privilege based on compliance, not a flawed property right granted simply because of longevity.

The Department of Education staff has identified an accreditor that enforced standards it knew were constitutionally flawed, cannot justify its own benchmarks, and has taken on the role of amending the Constitution.

The American Bar Association has behaved for decades like a factory for liberal lunatics. It has disregarded the Constitution of the United States as well as the Supreme Court and its rulings. To say that this is a narcissistic rogue operation would be one of the great understatements of the millennium.

The ABA is responsible for death and destruction across this nation. It has kneecapped the justice system for long enough. The assembly line of wokeism ends now.

Take away their accreditation rights; they haven’t deserved them for a long time.