Finish Off the ABA
Editor's Note
The Left’s long march through the institutions has not spared the law. Once the conscience of the republic, the American Bar Association has become its commissariat — a self-appointed regulator of speech, merit, and morality inside the profession that guards our courts. This dispatch from Garrett Snedeker documents how that capture happened, and how it can be undone. In an age when “equity” is wielded as law’s new god, the fight to reclaim the rule of law begins not in the courtroom but at its source: the accrediting boards, the law schools, and the bureaucrats who decide who may enter the bar.
In America’s cold civil war, every institution reveals what side it serves. The American Bar Association — once a respectable professional guild — has become one of the Left’s most entrenched power centers, a fortress of the regime masquerading as a neutral arbiter of the law. What was once a trade association for lawyers now functions as a political gatekeeper, deciding who may interpret, teach, and practice law in this country.
I saw that dynamic firsthand in early June, when I sat in a U.S. Senate committee hearing room to support the judicial nomination of a friend. I expected Senate Democrats to object to the nominees, including my friend. What I didn’t expect was the first set of words to emerge from ranking Democrat Dick Durbin (D–IL).
Instead of addressing any nominee’s merits, Durbin attacked the Trump administration for cutting out the American Bar Association — even reminding the committee that the ABA had labeled nine of Trump’s judicial nominees in his first term “unqualified,” while breathlessly warning that this was the first hearing with no ABA involvement. And thank God for that.
It’s no wonder Durbin wasted his speaking opportunity on defending the ABA. He wasn’t arguing for neutrality. Durbin was simply defending a partisan fortress.
In the last decade, the ABA has filed left-leaning amicus briefs on voting and civil rights fights, championed DACA, and enshrined DEI dogma into law school accreditation standards. The Left’s project has always depended on seizing professional associations at the commanding heights of American cultural life: medicine, education, journalism, and law. Each conquest grants a new means of defining what counts as legitimate knowledge, speech, or conduct. And amid the fight for control of the law itself, no institution has served the Left more faithfully than the ABA.
It’s easy enough to underestimate how much power the ABA retains over legal education and professional licensure. It hasn’t been long since the organization’s power was nigh unassailable. The ABA held a de facto veto over judicial nominees, its ratings treated as sacrosanct by everyone from presidents to senators. Indeed, for more than a hundred years, the association has set the standards for law schools — since 1952, it has remained the only federally recognized accreditor.
In effect, the ABA has been a monopoly with the influence needed to shape every law school curriculum in America. That changed under President Trump, who refused to recognize the ABA as an authority. The administration broke a century-old spell, exposing the Association’s influence as profoundly political.
In February, Attorney General Pam Bondi sent ABA leadership a letter demanding the organization abandon its diversity mandates or risk losing federal recognition as an accreditor. In April, President Trump issued an executive order directing the Secretary of Education to review “accreditors who fail to meet recognition criteria or otherwise violate federal law, including by requiring institutions seeking accreditation to engage in unlawful discrimination in accreditation-related activity under the guise of ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion.’” The order specifically named the ABA as violating the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard.
Now, Republicans should finish the job. The Trump administration stripped the ABA of its role in judicial nominations; the next step is dismantling its control over law schools and the bar itself. The fight for the rule of law depends on freeing the pipeline that produces lawyers from ideological commissars.
Even as its federal influence wanes, the ABA still enjoys immense power at the state level. As Heritage Foundation analysts Zack Smith and GianCarlo Canaparo have noted, “in many states, [the ABA] controls access to the bar examination. While the authority to set rules governing bar eligibility rests with state courts, many states give the ABA unique authority under those rules.”
The Association wields that authority through its accreditation process. Law schools know that if they lose ABA accreditation, their graduates may be prohibited from taking the bar exam in several states — and that fear gives the ABA enormous leverage. Though it directly accredits only sixteen schools federally, its unofficial influence extends indirectly through the states, using the threat of withholding approval to enforce compliance. Law schools bend over backward to meet its expectations: installing diversity officers, lowering admissions standards, and reshaping curricula to satisfy racial quotas and ideological checkboxes.
Mere rumors of lost accreditation have triggered institutional panic. The possibility of losing ABA approval can lead schools to rewrite policies overnight; to administrators, the Association’s mandates operate as edicts. The result is a system of delegated sovereignty: elected and constitutional authorities surrendering their prerogatives to a self-perpetuating guild whose legitimacy rests on reputation rather than consent. The Left long ago recognized that if you control the credentials, you control the class; if you control the class, you control the culture. The capture of the accrediting process is a form of institutional colonization, replacing moral formation with ideological conformity.
The ABA is tightening its grip precisely as it loses public legitimacy. It continues to wield bureaucratic power to enforce ideological orthodoxy. Accreditation and renewal are conditioned on compliance with DEI and “experiential learning” requirements that often have little to do with the study of law and everything to do with political catechesis.
Every act of overreach invites revolt. This year, the ABA proposed doubling required “experiential” credits from six to twelve — a change that would raise costs, strain faculty, and inflate tuition for already debt-burdened students. Even within the legal academy, backlash erupted. As Daniel Rodriguez, a former Northwestern Law dean and ABA committee member, put it: “The ABA ought not to be in the business of increasing programmatic requirements that are expensive.” Chicago law professor Brian Leiter, too, openly condemned the Association’s arrogance back in August: “The ABA Council on Legal Education ignores critics, offers no substantive responses, and says ‘full speed ahead’ with disrupting legal education at most of the nation’s law schools.”
The ABA shows no sign of relenting, even as frustration builds. But, of course, frustration with the ABA isn’t necessarily new. As Smith and Canaparo recount, even the Clinton Justice Department once sued the ABA over its costly accreditation mandates — from inflated faculty salaries to one-size-fits-all rules governing library holdings and staff. The Association’s bureaucratic rationalization has long served as a means of control rather than improvement.
The difference is that now the system could actually be reformed in total. As it stands, states are already reclaiming their authority.
The Texas Supreme Court, in a rather decisive move, recently stripped the ABA of its accreditation power and restored that duty to the state itself — a power it held before ceding control in the early 1980s. Per law professor Derek Muller, any new rules for accreditation will be set by the state (not the ABA) and won’t be any more burdensome than current ones.
Last spring, Florida created a Supreme Court workgroup to re-evaluate whether the ABA should have any accreditation role at all. Even California, though governed by the Left, provides a model of independence: Its Law Office Study Program allows candidates the option to prepare for the state bar by apprenticing to experienced attorneys rather than enrolling in ABA-accredited law schools. For red states seeking liberation from the ABA’s control, California’s alternative is proof another system is possible.
All red states ought to join ranks here, leading the counteroffensive. Legislatures and attorneys general should launch formal inquiries into the ABA’s influence, draft their own accreditation standards free from DEI ideology, and open alternate paths to bar admission. And while the momentum for non-ABA accreditation is building, policymakers should press the gas.
The battle over law schools is only a proxy for a deeper question: Who rules? The people or an unelected clerisy invoking “professional standards” as its shield? In this cold civil war, whoever governs the lawyers governs the law; whoever governs the law governs the nation. If you break the ABA’s grip in one place, you’ll seed a movement.
And in the long fight, each win expands the field of action.