If American Bar Association Keeps Forcing DEI on Law Schools, It Should Lose the Authority to Accredit Them

(Daily Signal)—Virtually every law school in America must be accredited by the American Bar Association, an organization that has abused this position of trust to push a radical leftist agenda on law students, including policies that violate the law itself.

The American Bar Association has long held an undeserved position as a vaunted legal institution—largely through the imprimatur certain government largesse has given it.

For instance, since 1965, when Congress passed the Higher Education Act, the U.S. Department of Education has recognized the ABA as the sole accrediting agency for American law schools.

On top of that, nearly every state requires those seeking admission to its bar to have graduated from an ABA-accredited law school.

Yet the ABA’s radical leftist agenda has been painfully apparent with several of its recent actions, including its dangerous statement that the Equal Rights Amendment had been ratified as the 28th Amendment to the Constitution when, in fact, it had not been. The ABA’s position was so partisan and radical that even then-President Joe Biden’s archivist of the United States, who certifies new amendments to the Constitution, rejected it out of hand.

Additionally, the ABA has also sued the Trump administration and issued mendacious statements about the need for lawyers to stand up to protect the rule of law in response to President Donald Trump’s actions. Interestingly, the ABA remained eerily silent when Democrat senators such as Chuck Schumer and Sheldon Whitehouse threatened sitting Supreme Court justices and made clear their intent to undermine public confidence in the U.S. Supreme Court.

Given its overt opposition and disdain for Trump (and really anyone who doesn’t embrace a radical leftist agenda), it makes sense that conservative lawyers are using common sense to call for removing the ABA from its privileged position of vetting judicial nominees to the federal bench—a position the Trump Justice Department seems ready to embrace.

Despite all of these misdeeds, the ABA’s most problematic positions have been when it has tried to use its quasi-governmental accrediting power to force law schools to violate the law.

Yes, you heard that right. The ABA, with its stated mission of serving the legal profession and the public “by defending liberty and delivering justice as the national representative of the legal profession,” has tried to force law schools to break the law. (Set aside the facts that the ABA hasn’t defended liberty or delivered justice and certainly isn’t a national representative of the legal profession.)

Specifically, the ABA has tried to force law schools to discriminate in admissions and employment on the basis of race.

No, this isn’t a tale from bygone days. Instead, it’s a sad story playing out in real time today.

What’s particularly galling has been the ABA’s position that its own rules trump any other law—even the U.S. Constitution!

When the ABA first received pushback to its proposed Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Standard (Standard 206) that law schools must meet to keep accreditation, it had the audacity to issue a statement saying, “The requirement of a constitutional provision or statute that purports to prohibit consideration of race, color, ethnicity, … [etc.] in admissions or employment decisions is not a justification for a schools noncompliance with Standard 206.”

In other words, the ABA said that schools had to comply with its discriminatory race-based standards for admissions and employment, regardless of what the Constitution or the law states.

Lest its intent be misunderstood, it later clarified: “To ensure the effective educational use of diversity, a law school should include among its faculty, staff, and student [body] members of all underrepresented groups, but should be particularly focused on those groups that historically have been underrepresented in the legal profession because of race or ethnicity.”

Worse still, as Attorney General Pam Bondi recently pointed out, the ABA left law schools in legal limbo for more than 18 months after the U.S. Supreme Court made clear that such racial discrimination is illegal—though that already should have been clear.

It’s a welcome development that the ABA temporarily suspended enforcement of Standard 206, but as Bondi pointed out, this temporary halt isn’t enough. In noting its temporary pause on enforcement, the ABA said that its “commitment to ensuring access to legal education to all people, including those who have been historically excluded from the legal profession … has not changed.” In other words, as Bondi said, its “commitment to DEI” remains in place.

In a letter to ABA leaders, Bondi made clear that “if diversity is defined in terms of race and sex outcomes, [as the ABA continues to do regardless of Standard 206], universities cannot lawfully pursue diversity by any means.”

Bondi noted that the ABA’s “status as the sole accrediting body of American law schools is a privilege, and mandatory diversity objectives are an abuse of that privilege, which is subject to revocation.” She continued, saying that even “if it does not come to that, it is unclear how state bars can lawfully continue to require prospective lawyers to attend ABA-accredited law schools if the [ABA] continues to abuse its privilege in this way.”

She closed by making clear that the “Department of Justice stands ready to take every action necessary to prevent further abuse.”

And to that, I say kudos to Bondi for standing ready to take these long-overdue actions.