Education Department moves to strip American Bar Association of law school accreditation

The Education Department has recommended stripping the American Bar Association (ABA) of its decades-long authority to accredit U.S. law schools, citing dozens of compliance gaps in a nearly 500-page staff report, more than a year in the making, that recommends denying the ABA's petition for renewed recognition.

The Education Department took the first step on Aug. 21 toward removing that authority, David Barker, assistant secretary of education, said in comments to The Wall Street Journal, which first reported the recommendation. The action escalates a monthslong clash between the Trump administration and the ABA, which Republicans have accused of pushing diversity, equity and inclusion policies onto law schools and rating some of President Donald Trump's judicial nominees as unqualified. Barker said accreditation without competition “operates like a cartel,” allowing accreditors to substitute their own political and ideological preferences for educational judgment.

The report found the ABA's Council of the Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar was not "separate and independent" of the association's broader advocacy work, as federal rules require. The report also faulted the council for waiting until February 2025, nearly two years after the Supreme Court barred race-conscious college admissions, to suspend its diversity accreditation standard. More specifically, education department staff found the ABA had not finalized bylaws — proposed in January 2026 and still awaiting a vote by its Section of Legal Education as of August — that would formally separate the accrediting council's governance from the wider association, leaving its independent status undocumented. 

On diversity policy, the report found the council's own training materials acknowledged, as early as 2022 and again after the 2023 ruling, that the standard would need to change, but the council kept training evaluators under the old standard through the 2024-2025 review cycle before suspending it, a gap the report concluded fell short of the rule requiring agencies to act within 12 months of identifying a needed change.

Melissa Hart, chair of the ABA's accreditation council, told the Journal the council is confident it complies with federal law and the Education Department's requirements.

“As a national accrediting body for American law schools, we remain focused on ensuring quality legal education that produces competent, ethical attorneys who are eligible for licensure,” she said. 

Reuters reported that Hart said the council looks forward to clarifying the record when it appears before a federal advisory panel next month.

The council has accredited U.S. law schools since 1952 and currently accredits 197 of them, 13 as freestanding institutions, according to the report; the last renewal of its recognition, in 2021, was approved for a five-year term that comes up for review this cycle. 

The Aug. 21 recommendation is not final. It goes next to the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity, which is scheduled to hear from the ABA at a meeting Sept. 23-24 in Washington, D.C., according to a notice published in the Federal Register. Under Secretary of Education Nicholas Kent will then make a final determination, a process the Journal reported is still several months away, with the outcome uncertain. Law schools affiliated with a university would likely rely on that university's existing accreditor if the ABA lost its authority, the Journal surmised. The 13 freestanding schools would need to find a new one to keep students eligible for federal aid.

The independence and diversity findings are two of roughly 26 separate compliance criteria the report found the ABA did not meet. Many of the others follow a similar pattern: The council told the department it had already revised a rule, but couldn't produce a published, codified version of the change because it came after the 2025-2026 rulebook had gone to print. 

The dispute is part of an administration-wide effort to scrutinize the ABA and higher education generally, the Journal reported. The Labor Department and Federal Trade Commission have said they won't support staff attorneys attending ABA events, and the FTC has separately called the ABA's accreditation power anticompetitive. The ABA successfully sued the Justice Department last year over the cancellation of grants that funded training for lawyers representing victims of domestic and sexual violence. Trump has described accreditation as a key tool for remaking higher education and signed an executive order making it easier for schools to switch accreditors.