The American Bar Association Harms Law Schools and Should Lose Its Accreditation Monopoly

It’s just another left-wing interest group and deserves to be treated as such.

Leadership failures and bureaucratic bloat have led to a crisis in higher education. We’ve seen a subversion of the core university missions to seek truth and knowledge, as well as a distortion of classical liberal values such as free speech, due process, and equality under the law. The theme of my new book Lawless is that this illiberal dynamic is particularly dangerous in the context of law schools, which produce the gatekeepers of our legal and political institutions.

The root cause of all of this is a noxious postmodern ideology that contends that truth is subjective and must be viewed through the lenses of race, gender, and other identity categories, according to some privilege hierarchy. Your rights and freedoms depend on whether you’re part of a class deemed oppressor or oppressed. It’s a frontal attack on the rule of law on which American liberty, equality, and prosperity reside.

One of the underappreciated aspects of what’s gone wrong, especially with law schools, is accreditation. Analyzing the rules governing legal education may not be as attention-grabbing as showing how critical theory has perverted pedagogy or documenting the inquisitions of DEI offices, but it’s crucial for understanding underlying pathologies and thus for any possibility of reform. That’s why Attorney General Pam Bondi wrote to the American Bar Association in February to demand that it abandon its diversity mandates or lose the role it’s held since 1952 as the sole accreditor of U.S. law schools. And it’s why President Trump’s April 23 executive order on accreditation specifically called out the ABA requirement that law schools have “a student body that is diverse with respect to gender, race, and ethnicity” as violating the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard to bar racial preferences.