Florida Leads Fight Against Corrupt American Bar Association

The ABA’s left-wing bias targets Catholic law schools, exposing the need for reform in America’s politicized legal education system.

Last month, Florida Attorney General James Uttmeier made public a letter to the American Bar Association (“ABA”) accusing it of violating the First Amendment right to religious freedom when it said a Catholic law school did not meet one of its equal opportunity accreditation standards. The school is Florida’s St. Thomas University College of Law, and the standard is number 205, titled “Non-discrimination and Equal Opportunity.” The ABA’s finding did not specify how St. Thomas fell short.

Standard 205 is distinct from the ABA’s standard 206, which requires law schools to commit to diversity ideology to get accredited. The ABA needed to suspend 206 earlier this year since it conflicted not only with President Trump’s Executive Orders banning diversity ideology (aka “diversity, equity, and inclusion” or “DEI”) but also likely violated the 2023 United States Supreme Court opinion Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (“SFFA”) as well. In SFFA, the high court found diversity rationales for race-based practices unpersuasive, suggesting that “diversity” was actually a euphemism for the very ethnic stereotyping the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause was meant to prevent.

Between the left-wing ABA and a traditional Catholic law school, the ABA is almost certainly the bad actor. Uttmeier deserves praise for telling it to call off its ideological accreditation dogs. No more ABA authoritarianism!

Founded in 1878, the ABA began as a voluntary association of attorneys to improve the legal profession and encourage public service. It is a private entity organized as a nonprofit with its principal place of business in Chicago. In time, each state also developed its own bar association, most of which now oversee the state bar examinations that must be passed by law school graduates or others seeking to practice law in that state. The ABA also began to develop ethical and professional codes of conduct for lawyers, and by the 1920s, it devised standards for legal education.

But formal legal education did not become the norm in America until well after the Second World War. Before then, most American lawyers entered the profession as law clerks or apprentices. The role of the ABA was therefore quite limited, and the training for attorneys varied greatly by state.

After the war, American higher education exploded when Congress passed the Serviceman’s Readjustment Act of 1944, aka the “GI Bill,” which offered low-interest loans to war veterans for college. That provision paved the way for Title IV of the Higher Education Act of 1965, which created the federal financial aid program (more student loans), including for law school. Most relevant, the Act relied on private entities such as the ABA to accredit colleges and law schools as eligible to receive Title IV funds. With this new role, the ABA grew in importance and power such that now most state bar associations actually require graduation from an ABA-approved law school to simply take the bar exam.

And, incredibly, the ABA remains to this day the sole accrediting agency of American law schools.

Such exclusive gatekeeping power in one entity offends the American sense of checks and balances and fundamental fairness—no small irony since the legal profession is supposed to be about justice. As with all concentrations of unchecked power, the situation was ripe for abuse.

The corruption of the ABA happened alongside the corruption of most American legal education and also higher education generally. It began in the 1960s when law schools began to see themselves as institutions seeking national stature rather than institutions preparing students for the state bar and state-based legal practice. They stopped hiring area lawyers, for example, who knew state and local law, in favor of academics from so-called prestigious law schools, even when those academics had no connection to the state and no familiarity with that state’s laws. Most, in fact, had no practical legal experience at all, which remains the case today. Most law professors have never tried a case, argued an appeal, or even represented a client.

This trend away from the local and the practical and toward centralization was accompanied by conformity and left-of-center politicization, then called political correctness, amply documented in works such as Roger Kimball’s Tenured Radicals (1989) and Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind (1987). Today, law professors are over 95% registered Democrats. As Georgetown law professor Nicholas Rosenkranz explained, “[L]aw faculties are overwhelmingly liberal … Moreover, the ideological median … seems to lie not just left of center but closer to the left edge of the Democrat party. Many are further left than that.”

The ABA was all in on this politicization: it too began to embrace left-wing causes, starting with support for abortion, alienating many (even most) of its members and prompting the founding of other professional organizations such as the National Lawyers Association and The Federalist Society.

Notably, however, none of these alternatives has sought to become accreditors of law schools. This must change.

In fact, most of American higher and legal education must change—and may be in the process of changing right now. Enrollments are down, for example, and many smaller colleges are closing.

Still, the concept of accreditation to ensure quality is sound. Students and families are often at sea when choosing a college, and all the more so now when status no longer corresponds to excellence. Harvard and Columbia seem to be producing activist revolutionaries, for example, rather than wise and well-read citizens.

For law schools, groups like the Federalist Society or the Christian Legal Society should consider assuming this role. They need not become formal accreditors overnight. Instead, they could start small and issue lists of schools that have a more politically balanced faculty, more valuable scholarship, and less hostility toward America. The Cardinal Newman Society serves this kind of function for Catholic families and colleges. Founded by Patrick Reilly, it scrutinizes schools claiming to be Catholic to see if this is “in name only,” since many such prominent schools—think Notre Dame and Georgetown—have long been swapping their Catholic character to join the politically correct. Parents deserved to know this and, thanks to Newman Society lists of “Newman-approved schools,” now they do.

The Florida Supreme Court is actually also leading the effort to find alternative law school accreditors, with the Texas Supreme Court not far behind. As Uttmeier’s letter stated, “[R]eform is in the air.” None too soon!

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The ABA needs to be dismantled and rebuilt from scratch.

Not going to happen - the membership is just too far left because conservative lawyers are a rather small minority. It will continue to get money from its overwhelming ingly Democrat membership base.

The article has the right idea - an alternative accrediting agency. What also is needed is for successful court challenges or legislation to break the legal monopoly private bar associations have over attorney conduct and discipline.

Attorneys are some of the least qualified professionals in any industry. Their professional degree is a liberal arts degree and guarantees no competence in the subject matter.

If 10 lawyers are asked their opinions there would be 100 opinions.

For law being so black and white that everyone must adhere to it, it is not definitive or predictable.

I have worked with a number of attorneys and none were reliable.

Sometime around the 1960's as the ABA was consolidating its monopoly on American law schools, U.S. law schools changed their first law degree from a two year Bachelor of Laws, (LL. B.) to the more elitist three year Juris Doctor, (J.D.) degree. (It is called that despite never having had a requirement for a doctor thesis.) These law schools pivoted from teaching practical state law needed to pass the state bar exam to teaching sophism. Exams were once semester, and usually "issue spotter" exams designed to test how many possible legal problems could be inferred, rather than testing application of actual laws. The tests are designed to measure a students potential as a litigious corporate attorney, rather than a wise legal counselor.

ABA law professors are typically not practicing attorneys but leftist academics, who strangely usually don't have a second law degree. Their sole qualification to teach law, is that they received high grades in their first law degree. This is like allowing a person to become an engineering professor because he/she got good marks on their B.S. degree in engineering.

In the U.K., a first law degree, Bachelor of Laws (LL. B.) is earned like any other university degree. So after a four year degree students can become solicitors, who do not bring or argue cases. That role is for the barristers, who have more knowledge and experience. In the U.S., we have no such comparable staged system to mint new lawyers. One possible improvement is to have students gain a first law degree such as an LL. B., and then become paralegals, before serving an apprenticeship before becoming full lawyers. That would restore something like the previous system, while reducing or eliminating the role of the ABA. It needs to go. ABA law profs are largely useless members of society who do nothing more than haze young law students while collecting obscene salaries.

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