Free Republic

For most Americans, the American Bar Association is merely a professional guild that publishes ethics opinions, hosts conferences, and occasionally weighs in on public policy. But in legal education, the ABA has long occupied a far more consequential role as de facto gatekeeper to the profession. That status helps explain why the ABA’s recent move to suspend—and purportedly, to eliminate—two of its controversial diversity mandates for law schools represents more than an internal procedural dispute. It signals a potentially significant recalibration in the balance between accreditation authority, constitutional law, and ideological conformity in higher education. To understand why the fight...

Roughly one in three students at one of the nation’s top law schools now carries a disability designation, a figure that stood at a fraction of that just five years ago. About 378 students at the UC Berkeley School of Law have enrolled in the campus Disabled Students’ Program as of spring 2026, according to the program’s annual data. Across the full campus, the program served 4,153 students in 2020-2021 and 5,711 by 2024-2025. Psychological and emotional conditions lead all categories at 2,443 students, followed by ADD/ADHD at 1,666, while physical disabilities such as mobility, hearing and vision trail far...

In the fall of 2023, I took my first law school exam, a 13-page extravaganza replete with tortured fact patterns and endlessly subdividing short-answer questions. We had all of three hours to complete it. In a state of sustained panic, I macheted my way through the onslaught of pages, managing—just barely—to finish in the nick of time. The result was a piece of work product that, in any other legal context, would be career-ending: an unedited first draft, blurted out under conditions of extreme haste. Several students I spoke with had failed to complete the exam at all. Other students,...

May 15 (Reuters) - A longstanding diversity and inclusion requirement for U.S. law schools is teetering amid mounting pressure from the Trump administration and Republican states. The American Bar Association council that oversees law school accreditation voted on Friday to eliminate a ​rule that requires law schools to demonstrate their commitment to diversity in recruitment, admissions, and student programming. The ‌rule has been suspended since February 2025, after Republican President Donald Trump returned to the White House and began cracking down on diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. "Even though I personally agree with [the diversity and inclusion standard] and what...

I am not a lawyer, nor am I a product of the American legal academy. But a patriotic higher-education policy cannot leave the legal profession to the lawyers alone. We all rely on them to manage the legal and constitutional operating system of the Republic. A patriotic higher-education policy assumes that the goal of government intervention in higher education is to make public and publicly privileged universities advance the cause of America. From that standpoint, there are two features of legal education that need to be taken into account. First, there is the external test of the quality of a...

A visiting professor at Harvard Law School has been placed on administrative leave after allegedly firing a pellet rifle outside a Brookline synagogue on the eve of Yom Kippur. Carlos Portugal Gouvea, 43, was arrested Wednesday night after police said he fired two shots near Temple Beth Zion on Beacon Street in what he later claimed was “hunting rats,” Brookline.News reported. Investigators do not believe that Gouvea was targeting the synagogue, but he was charged in Brookline District Court with illegally discharging a pellet gun, disorderly conduct, disturbing the peace and malicious damage of personal property, according to court records....

A number of “sacred cow” beliefs regarding higher education are (finally!) coming under scrutiny. One of them is that it is important for the American Bar Association (ABA) to oversee law schools via its power of accreditation. In all but a few states, any individual who wants to enter the legal profession must graduate from an ABA-accredited law school before being allowed to sit for the state’s bar exam. That restriction has long been defended as a measure to protect consumers, both students (who might otherwise attend an inferior law school) and people in the community (who might take their...

It is worrisome that “progressive” activism has managed to infiltrate so much of American higher education, but wildly politicized sociology and English departments can do us only marginal damage. Few students are interested in the ravings of those professors, and almost no one is influenced by their writings. On the other hand, the leftist capture of our law schools is a very serious matter. How we educate future lawyers and judges affects society as a whole. The corruption of our legal system is not a minor illness we can shake off; it’s a life-threatening disease. In his new book Lawless:...

Helyeh Doutaghi, deputy director of Yale Law School’s Law and Political Economy Project, placed on “immediate administrative leave” as university investigates allegations.. A research scholar at Yale Law School also moonlights as a member of a U.S.-sanctioned terrorist fundraising entity, according to web postings reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon. Those postings reveal that Helyeh Doutaghi, the deputy director of Yale Law School’s Law and Political Economy Project, is a member of Samidoun, an organization sanctioned by the U.S. government in October in an announcement that described it as a "sham charity" and a "front organization" for the Popular Front...

Most industries and occupations have trade associations to promote their interests through lobbying, marketing, and public relations. Lawyers are no exception. One difference between, say, the American Urological Association and the American Bar Association, however, is that instead of merely providing opportunities for professional networking and vacation junkets dressed up as “conventions,” the left-leaning ABA is clothed with quasi-governmental regulatory authority over the entire field of legal education. The ABA effectively oversees the operations of nearly 200 law schools in the United States. Absurdly, this professional cartel regulates itself! The U.S. Department of Education limits eligibility for federal student loans...

Law school deans from over 100 higher learning institutions across the country signed a letter calling on students to disagree with people respectfully, while upholding the rule of law and championing the U.S. Constitution. The American Bar Association’s (ABA) Task Force for American Democracy unveiled the letter, which was signed by 119 deans, including Kerry Abrams of the Duke University School of Law; Paul Brest of Stanford Law School; Jennifer Gerarda Brown of Quinnipiac University; Jens David Ohlin of Cornell Law School; Heather K. Gerken of Yale School of Law; Risa Goluboff of the University of Virginia School of Law;...

The student editors of the Columbia Law Review issued a statement on Wednesday urging Columbia Law School to cancel exams in the wake of the police operation that cleared the university’s unauthorized encampment, saying the "violence" had left them "irrevocably shaken" and "unable to focus." The statement, which represents the majority opinion of the editorial board and was endorsed by five other law journals, including the Columbia Human Rights Law Review & A Jailhouse Lawyer’s Manual, accused the police of "brutalizing" students—though no major injuries have been reported—and claimed that canceling exams was a "proportionate response" to the "distress our...

Higher education did not have a good year in 2023, as evidenced by high-profile resignations at Penn (Liz Magill) and Harvard (Claudine Gay). This followed abysmal televised congressional testimony in which the two Ivy League presidents and MIT’s Sally Kornbluth refused to condemn campus calls for genocide against Jews. Harvard’s disgrace was compounded by revelations of serial plagiarism on the part of Gay. The legal academy has fared no better in recent years, with highly publicized incidents of intolerance, de facto censorship, and speech suppression at Stanford Law (e.g., students heckling Fifth Circuit judge Kyle Duncan), Yale Law (e.g., disruption...

New York University's Law School Bar Association president stated that Hamas' slaughter of children in Israel was 'necessary,' in an email send to members of the university community. Ryna Workman, 24, a non-binary student at NYU's School of Law sent a weekly newsletter saying the murder of innocent Israeli children, women, and citizens this past week was is Israel's 'full responsibility.' Workman, from Simpsonville, South Carolina, also refused to condemn Hamas - an internationally-recognized terrorist group who have triggered the all-out war. New York University told DailyMail.com that Workman's statement 'does not in any way reflect the point of view...

Observers of the American collegiate scene are likely well aware of the academic jihad against University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax and the disgraceful shouting down of federal judge Kyle Duncan at Stanford, led by a woke DEI apparatchik. But in terms of outrageous violations of American norms of academic conduct, due process, and civility, nothing compares with the treatment of Professor Scott Gerber of Ohio Northern University (ONU). Unlike elite coastal schools like Penn or Stanford, ONU is a Midwestern private school of so-so reputation, not on lists of the 10 best colleges in Ohio, much less the...

The Supreme Court’s decision to prohibit affirmative action has the racists who run our university in a pickle.They want to discriminate based on race, but they are legally limited by the decision in the ways that they can pretend not to be.Columbia University Law School came up with a clever plan: ask students to send in a video of them talking for no more than 90 seconds. Ostensibly the goal was to show how the student comes across. What are they like?Except, well, 90 seconds. Not exactly a lot of personal data can be gleaned from 90 seconds of a...

You probably don’t realize it, but over 150 years after the Civil War ended and slavery was abolished, we still have “Badges and Incidents of Slavery” in our country, and we need a “Radical Vision for a Third Reconstruction.” At least, that is what you would be learning as a gullible student at the University of Pennsylvania School of Law, according to a conference held there on Feb. 17 entitled “The Unfinished Work of Abolition.” That was one of the first things we found in our review of UPenn Law, which is next in the series that J. Christian Adams...

Pro-Israel groups and Jewish allies are calling for the City University of New York's (CUNY) public law school to lose its funding after a graduating student accused Israel of "indiscriminately raining bullets and bombs" on Palestinians during her commencement speech. She also claimed laws are "white supremacy" and attacked the "fascist" NYPD and U.S. military. Fatima Mousa Mohammed, who was selected by the 2023 class to speak at the May 12 CUNY Law ceremony, accused Israel of "indiscriminately" murdering Palestinians and encouraging "lynch mobs." She also celebrated resistance to "Zionism around the world" while lauding the school's support of the...

The Chronicle of Higher Education, a politically partisan higher education publication and lobby platform headquartered in Washington, D.C., recently sought to report on how law school rankings may have changed, due to a handful of progressive institutions led by Yale, Harvard, and Berkeley, that protested the U.S. News & World Report rankings methodology: the law schools claimed that these rankings undermined minorities by overemphasizing the schools’ elitist status, and thereby alienated many students from applying. The Chronicle tried to spin the new rankings as reflecting some improved outcome.It should be pretty obvious, however, that there is nothing new about the...

It’s not clear exactly why these CUNY Law School grads decided to turn their backs on Mayor Adams but if I had to guess it was probably his reluctance to call the death of a Jordan Neely a murder and instead suggest people should wait for the results of an investigation. But the way it came across today was a bunch of leftists booing him for having once been a police officer.As the City University of New York School of Law dean, Sudha Setty, introduced the mayor on Friday, she noted his time spent on the police force. The crowd...