Trump moves to cancel American Bar Association accreditation of law schools

The ABA has been the gatekeeper for who gets to call themselves a lawyer in this country for over a century, and almost nobody outside legal circles ever stopped to ask why a private trade association got that power in the first place. It's not a government body. It doesn't answer to voters. Yet it decides which law schools live or die through accreditation, and it has spent years pushing diversity mandates and ideological litmus tests on schools that just want to teach people how to practice law. So when the Trump administration says enough, we're not shocked. We're mildly surprised it took this long.

Critics will call this an attack on legal standards, but the ABA's standards have increasingly meant something other than competence. Schools have been leaned on to hit diversity numbers in hiring and admissions or risk their accreditation status, which is a strange thing for a supposedly neutral credentialing body to be doing. If the goal is producing good lawyers, that's a measurable thing: bar passage rates, employment outcomes, actual legal skill. It is not a DEI checklist.

Where we'd urge caution is on what replaces it. Killing a bad gatekeeper is easy. Building a better one, whether through state bars, a rival accrediting body, or something else entirely, is the harder and more important work. If this move is just about scoring a culture war point against a group conservatives have disliked since the Federalist Society was founded in opposition to it, that's satisfying for about a week and useless after that.

Still, there's something honest about forcing the question into the open. The ABA has operated for decades as if its authority were self-evident. It never was. Making that explicit, even clumsily, is worth doing.