Reassessing the ABA’s Accreditation: Who Gets to Become a Lawyer?

I. The ABA’s Losing Grip

After decades of dominance, the American Bar Association’s (ABA) influence on legal education faces challenges from both states and the federal government. States began increasingly questioning whether a single, self-selected organization should retain exclusive control over who may become a lawyer. Just this year, Texas and Florida were among the first to cease their dependence on the ABA, triggering a domino effect that prompted Ohio and Tennessee to open their own reviews. The federal government has also launched challenges against the ABA. The Trump Administration severed its decades-old practice to collaborate with the ABA to vet judicial nominees. These challenges may have long-lasting effects that can reshape law school attendance and bar admissions. At their core, questions about the ABA’s accreditation power signal a broader shift in who decides who becomes a lawyer.

Whether the ABA can be viewed as a true monopoly is still up for debate. However, its lack of competition is indisputable. The ABA is uniquely positioned as the sole accreditor of law schools. At the same time, the ABA’s perceived partisan tilt in its judicial vetting, its commitment to diversity, and its history of taking positions on contested political and social issues put the organization in the spotlight as a political target. The Department of Justice has already revoked the ABA’s advisory role in judicial nominations; barred federal attorneys from participating in ABA events; and is attempting to remove the ABA’s status as a federal accreditor. This is not the first time the ABA accreditation power has been scrutinized. The Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division sued the ABA in 1996 for allegedly stifling competition pay for faculty at accredited schools.

The current era of increased scrutiny on the ABA occurs alongside the Trump Administration’s attacks on law firms and legal institutions like Harvard. In May 2026, the ABA responded by rescinding a rule requiring law schools to support diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). Yet this change did little to slow efforts by both the federal government and states to reduce the ABA’s control over law schools. This was not enough for the Department of Education (DOE), however, as it recommended stripping the ABA of its accreditation authority.

II. The ABA Under Fire

Since 1952, the DOE has recognized the ABA as the exclusive and national accreditor of law schools in the United States. This recognition comes with several benefits. The ABA sets standards for its faculty, curriculum, and facilities. Additionally, accreditation allows students to apply for federal loans through Title IV.

Critics of the ABA’s accreditation power argue that when a single professional body controls entry into the legal profession, it inevitably shapes the market to serve its own interests. By setting the standards for who may teach and what may be taught, the argument goes, the ABA imposes ideological requirements such as DEI mandates, protects incumbents’ economic interests, and makes innovation prohibitively expensive for outsiders seeking to compete. The Trump Administration’s Executive Order 14279 specifically emphasizes that the ABA has become “improperly focused on compelling adoption of discriminatory ideology.”

Much of the criticism directed at the ABA, however, targets the House of Delegates, the ABA’s policy-making body, rather than from the Council, which alone controls accreditation decisions. This conflation is not entirely without basis, as the ABA has, at times, taken public positions on contested social issues through the House of Delegates. In 2017, for instance, the ABA filed an amicus brief in Gloucester County School Board v. G.G., arguing that inclusive bathroom policies were necessary to attract a diverse legal profession. More recently, the ABA filed an amicus brief in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization supporting the right to abortion, reinforcing critics’ perception of the ABA as a left-leaning advocacy organization rather than a neutral professional body.

Supporters of the ABA remain skeptical of these arguments. Dean Austen Parrish of the University of California, Irvine School of Law, warned that the ABA losing accreditation status could lead to a “patchwork of licensure requirements.” The vast majority of states currently require law students to graduate from an ABA-accredited law school to sit for the state’s bar exam. Eight of Texas’s ten ABA‑accredited law school deans cautioned that losing accreditation would impair graduates’ ability to find employment outside Texas, lower the schools’ overall employment rates, and damage their national reputations.

Both sides of this debate agree on the stakes, even if they disagree on the remedy. Supporters defending the current system argue that fracturing national accreditation would be a critical mistake. Critics respond that the ABA’s detailed standards raise operating costs for law schools and leave little room to experiment with online, hybrid, or competency-based models that could otherwise expand access to the profession. The disagreement, then, is not about whether legal education needs standards, but about who should set them.

III. If Not the ABA, Then Who?

Terminating an accreditor’s federal recognition is neither quick nor automatic. During the ABA’s mandatory five-year recognition review, the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity (NACIQI) could not reach a decision as to the future of ABA’s accreditation authority. Much of the concern focused on the structural independence of ABA’s Council from its House of Delegates. But even if a decision has been made, termination is not immediate. The NACIQI is only an advisory committee for the DOE and does not have the enforcement power to strip the ABA of its accreditation authority. On August 2026, a Staff Report was promulgated by the DOE advancing similar concerns, but like the NACIQI recommendation it lacks enforcement authority. Only the Secretary of Education can release a final decision. Even still, the ABA has administrative and judicial appeal rights that may significantly prolong the process of removing its accreditation. Take, for instance, the termination of the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools, a process that took roughly five years and multiple rounds of litigation before recognition was finally withdrawn.

In any event, there remains uncertainty about what may come next. Two paths are apparent. States can build their own accreditation or licensure structure independent of the ABA, as Texas, Florida, and a growing number of others are now testing. Alternatively, a rival national accrediting organization could emerge to compete directly with the ABA’s Council—a model with real precedent in fields like medicine, but with no clear candidate yet in law.

A. States

Texas offers the clearest model of this approach. Texas’s Supreme Court ended a 42-year arrangement under which graduation from an ABA-accredited law school was required to sit for the state bar, replacing it with the court’s own list of approved schools. Other states have taken a more incremental approach. Alabama, Massachusetts, and Tennessee already permit graduates of certain in-state, non-ABA-accredited schools to sit for their bar exams, while requiring students who attend out-of-state law schools to either graduate from an ABA-accredited institution or satisfy separate out-of-state practice requirements.

Four states go further than others. California, Vermont, Virginia, and Washington allow bar applicants to forgo law school altogether, provided they complete a structured apprenticeship or law office study program. Using California as an example, California permits graduates of law schools accredited only by the State Bar’s own Committee of Bar Examiners and even graduates of unaccredited schools provided they pass the state’s “Baby Bar” after their first year. The State Bar of Nevada, as an alternative, allows non-ABA graduates to sit for the state’s bar given approval by its Committee on Functional Equivalency.

Still, a majority of states require potential lawyers to have graduated from an ABA-accredited law school. Additionally, several studies[1] show that students from ABA schools score significantly higher than those who do not. State accreditation may lower barriers to entry within a single jurisdiction, but it does so by fragmenting the very portability that a national accreditor was designed to guarantee, creating the very “patchwork” Dean Parrish warned against.

B. Other Accreditation Regimes

In the legal field, the ABA reigns as the dominant accreditation body for juris doctor (J.D.) degree programs. But what would another accreditation organization look like? This is not a hypothetical model as it already exists in medical education. Physicians in the U.S. are trained through two entirely separate accreditation systems: the Liaison Committee on Medical Education (LCME) accredits M.D. granting programs, the Commission on Osteopathic College Accreditation (COCA) accredits D.O. granting programs, and the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education accredits residencies and fellowships for both. Both LCME and COCA are separately recognized by the DOE, and both lead to full physician licensure.

What is missing is an actual candidate. Conservative critics have used venues like the Federalist Society to publicize their objections to ABA accreditation, and the ABA’s own history includes breakaway groups such as the National Lawyers Guild founded in 1937 in response to the ABA’s historical exclusion of Black attorneys. As of September 2026, no other organization has formally stepped forward to accredit J.D. programs, and doing so would require satisfying the same federal recognition criteria, including a demonstrated track record and procedural independence.

Conclusion

As the ABA faces mounting scrutiny from both state governments and federal oversight, its long-standing authority over legal education and professional entry stands at a crossroads. This administration’s push against ABA’s accreditor status underscores the urgency of reform and transparency. Whether the organization adapts to shifting political and institutional pressures or clings to its traditional role will determine not only its own legitimacy but the future of legal accreditation.

Copyright © 2026 DeShawn Carter, J.D. Candidate, University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, Class of 2027.

          [1].  As mentioned within this article, because most states still require graduates from ABA-accredited law schools to sit for their state bar this statistic may be scrutinized. However, the link to California shows the best example of this claim.