The Texas and Florida supreme courts have freed themselves from a curious dependency. No longer will these states genuflect before the American Bar Association’s (ABA) altar of accreditation, a shrine at which most states have worshipped for decades.
The Texas Supreme Court’s Jan. 6 order – finalizing preliminary approval from last September after a deliberative solicitation of public commentary – reclaims direct authority over law school approvals for bar eligibility, while the Florida Supreme Court’s Jan. 15 order amends its rules to end the ABA’s role as the sole accrediting gatekeeper (effective Oct. 1, 2026), opening the door to other U.S. Department of Education-recognized accreditors; together, these represent not merely administrative housekeeping but a principled reclamation of authority improperly delegated.
The timing is auspicious. The Federal Trade Commission – an agency not typically aligned with conservative jurisprudence – weighed in during December, characterizing the ABA as a monopoly. When regulatory bodies and state judiciaries converge in recognizing institutional overreach, prudent observers take note.
Why did states surrender this authority in the first place?
The answer lies in that great centralizing impulse of late 20th-century America, when the legal profession, increasingly operating across state lines, sought uniformity through a national accrediting body. The ABA’s Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar became the de facto gatekeeper, and states – in a fit of administrative convenience masquerading as progressive sophistication – acquiesced to this arrangement.
This might have proven tolerable had the ABA maintained the studied neutrality befitting a professional organization of consequence. Regrettably, it has not. The association has transformed itself from a credentialing body focused on professional competence into an ideological vanguard pursuing progressive shibboleths with unseemly enthusiasm.
Consider the ABA Standing Committee on the Federal Judiciary, which has long been entrusted with evaluating judicial nominees. Conservatives have documented what appears to be a systematic pattern: nominees who embrace originalist jurisprudence or adhere to textualist interpretation face heightened scrutiny, while those committed to living constitutionalism receive gentler treatment.
The ABA’s public pronouncements compound the offense. On abortion access, LGBTQ+ initiatives, and the fashionable catechism of diversity, equity and inclusion, the ABA speaks not as a dispassionate arbiter of professional standards but as a partisan in our culture wars. When the ABA defends judges who frustrate conservative policy objectives – not on grounds of judicial independence, which would be defensible, but through political commentary – it forfeits any claim to institutional objectivity.
Attorney General Pam Bondi’s recent decision to terminate the ABA’s access to non-public information regarding judicial nominees represents an overdue correction. For decades, this privileged access conferred disproportionate influence over lifetime appointments to the federal bench. That such power was vested in an organization increasingly indistinguishable from left-wing advocacy groups represents a category error of the first magnitude.
The accreditation monopoly itself merits examination. The ABA’s standards increasingly embed ideological criteria orthogonal to legal competence. Model Rule of Professional Conduct 8.4, which addresses discrimination and harassment, has become a vehicle for imposing orthodoxy on matters that should remain subjects of good-faith disagreement in a pluralistic society. When professional standards become instruments of ideological enforcement, the profession itself suffers corruption.
The ABA’s accrediting arm is, formally, the Council of its Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar – a mere structural appendage of the association, not some freestanding corporation. Yet, in the solemn business of accrediting law schools for bar admission, this Council operates with studied independence from the parent body, the so-called “Big ABA,” a separation mandated by the U.S. Department of Education to shield its judgments from the association’s enthusiasms for advocacy or partisan posturing. Thus does bureaucracy achieve a simulacrum of impartiality while remaining firmly tethered to its institutional host.
Texas and Florida have demonstrated that states need not remain supplicants to this regime. Alabama’s Supreme Court could follow this example, avoiding the legislative morass that typically frustrates reform. The solution requires no statutory revision, no legislative committee hearings and no compromises extracted by various lobbyists. It demands only that our Supreme Court recognize what Texas and Florida acknowledged: the power to credential lawyers properly belongs to the states, not to a private organization that has subordinated professional standards to political advocacy.
The ABA’s transformation from professional association to progressive interest group did not occur overnight, nor was it inevitable. Critics will protest that abandoning ABA accreditation risks a race to the bottom, with states competing to lower standards and flood the legal market with incompetent practitioners. This objection presumes state supreme courts lack the capacity or will to maintain rigorous standards – a presumption both insulting and empirically unsupported.
State courts have every incentive to ensure that lawyers practicing before them meet exacting professional requirements. Indeed, they may prove more attentive to these concerns than a distant national organization preoccupied with ideological projects. For years, before Faulkner’s Thomas Goode Jones School of Law was ABA-accredited, its graduates, with the blessing of the Alabama Supreme Court, were eligible for membership in the State Bar. Miles Law School and Birmingham School of Law both lack ABA accreditation, but the Alabama Supreme Court allows their graduates to be admitted to the State Bar, provided they pass the bar examination and meet other ethical and character requirements.
The lesson of Texas and Florida is neither radical nor novel. It is simply a reminder that state supreme courts already possess the authority and experience to regulate the legal profession without outsourcing that responsibility to a national organization whose priorities no longer align with professional neutrality. Alabama has done so before, and continues to do so, without incident or embarrassment. The question is not whether the ABA should exist, but whether its accreditation regime should continue to enjoy compulsory status.
Texas and Florida have answered that question sensibly. Alabama would do well to consider the same course.
Allen Mendenhall is a Senior Advisor for the Capital Markets Initiative and a Research Fellow in the Thomas A. Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies at the Heritage Foundation. A lawyer with a Ph.D. in English from Auburn University, he has taught at multiple colleges and universities across Alabama and is the author or editor of nine books. Learn more at AllenMendenhall.com.
The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the policy or position of 1819 News. To comment, please send an email with your name and contact information to [email protected].
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