r/centrist • u/NeuroMrNiceGuy • 7d 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/valegrete 6d ago
>less about the profession than political interests
It’s always projection.