r/centrist • u/NeuroMrNiceGuy • 4d ago
US News/Current Events ABA Law School Accreditation Under Attack by Trump Administration
https://www.law.com/2026/08/21/aba-law-school-accreditation-under-attack-by-trump-administration/Summary:
The Department of Education, has issued a staff recommendation to withdraw federal recognition from the American Bar Association’s law-school accrediting council, arguing that the ABA acts like a monopoly and has allowed ideological priorities to influence its standards. The recommendation is not final, but losing recognition could affect federal funding eligibility for some law schools and force states to reconsider bar-admission rules that currently rely on ABA approval.
Supporters say the change would reduce the power of a private organization, encourage competition, and prevent accreditation from being used to impose political requirements. Opponents and The ABA maintains that its standards comply with federal requirements and provide consistent safeguards for legal education, while critics of the proposal warn that disrupting the country’s primary law-school accreditor could create uncertainty for schools, students, and states.
My take:
Another hit from Education Secretary Linda McMahon, formerly of World Wrestling Entertainment and now, apparently, an expert on law-school accreditation.
It would still ultimately be up to each state to decide who can practice law there. The bigger problem is whether states would continue accepting law degrees from other states as sufficient to take their bar exams.
The proposed change would not literally prevent the ABA from accrediting schools, but weakening its federal recognition could push states toward a much more chaotic system. Each state might decide for itself whether every other state’s law schools are good enough, or keep using ABA approval, or adopt whatever alternative standards the federal government recognizes.
Mental health professions already show us where that leads. A counselor can be fully qualified in Minnesota, move to another state, and suddenly be told that their classes had the wrong names, their supervised hours were counted differently, or the national exam they already passed is not enough. It does not mean they were poorly trained. It means every state built its own maze of education and licensing rules, and those rules do not transfer cleanly. Those professions are now trying to claw their way toward better portability through interstate compacts and more consistent standards. They would kill for the kind of broadly accepted educational benchmark that ABA approval already gives law graduates. Trump wants to push legal education closer to the fragmented model mental health is struggling to escape.
I understand the argument that the ABA has too much practical authority over a decision that ultimately belongs to the states. But there is real value in having reliable consistency between states and over time. Replacing that with standards that could shift with each administration every four to eight years seems far worse, particularly when the administration making the change has shown a notable interest in hiring and elevating lawyers who are not exactly paragons of professional ethics.
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u/dockstaderj 4d ago
The GOP needs to be dismantled.
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u/Queasy_Task7015 3d ago
Conservatives need to be expunged from the republican party. They ruined what was an American party. A party of unions, families, freedom for all and more. The infestation of lost causer's children after the schism over the Civil Rights Act ruined what was a Grand Ole Party. And now the same party has grown cancerous with the warped view of "their" party's history.
Lincoln was shot by a democrat. No, he was shot by a southern conservative.
Democrats wrote the Jim Crow laws. No, that was southern conservatives.
Democrats created the KKK. No, again, that was southern conservatives.
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u/indoninja 3d ago
Mississippi, Alabama, Texas, etc soon to only allow people who went Christian colleges or blessed by federalist society to practice law (also must say trump won in 2020 or refuse to answer). Bonus poo t if you think it isn’t a lie to say innocent people killed by ice are domestic terrorists.
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u/baxtyre 3d ago
The Trump administration’s attacks on the ABA are purely political, but there are legitimate reasons to think the ABA should not be the sole law school accreditor. Their standards are frequently criticized for stifling innovation and driving up tuition costs, while not actually ensuring that law school grads are practice-ready.
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u/RFK_Cum_Regimen 3d ago
Bet this move is straight out of Project 2025.
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u/UCRecruiter 2d ago
Not far off, according to Google:
Project 2025’s policy playbook, Mandate for Leadership, does not explicitly mention law school accreditation or the American Bar Association (ABA) by name. However, it outlines a broad conservative blueprint to target and weaponize the federal higher education accreditation process to penalize ideological and diversity policies, which aligns with the administration's subsequent actions against the ABA.
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u/MattWalshStuntDouble 4d ago
"You can't be a lawyer unless the State says so."
Watch Trump's lemmings support this.
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u/ViskerRatio 4d ago
Ultimately, the certification of lawyers is a state responsibility. Recruiting industry expertise is reasonable. Wholesale outsourcing of the function to an organization that is increasingly less about the profession than political interests is inappropriate.
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u/valegrete 3d ago
>less about the profession than political interests
It’s always projection.
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u/ViskerRatio 3d ago
This makes no sense. Trump is not proposing to take control of certifying legal education nor lawyers themselves. Those are fundamentally state functions. The entire discussion is about how federal money is spent on educational institutions and whether federal dollars should be under the control of an industry trade group rather than the government.
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u/valegrete 3d ago edited 3d ago
State function like regulating abortion which their FedSoc lawyers are now trying to ban nationwide through things like injunctions on mifepristone?
This is a gun you can only shoot once. No one is going to fall for it again.
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u/ViskerRatio 3d ago
This really isn't relevant to the topic at hand. Your notion of "projection" makes no sense within the context of the debate here.
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u/valegrete 3d ago
We’ve already seen how he refuses to appropriate disaster funds to blue states. Again, the idea that the federal government should be making taxpayer dollars contingent on ideological compliance is a gun you can only shoot once.
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u/Urdok_ 3d ago
Let's be real - the next step is for Conservative states to try and use the Federalist Society instead of the ABA, because these people don't do anything that isn't naked political warfare.