Trump executive order says ABA's role as law school accreditor may be revoked

By Karen Sloan

April 24 (Reuters) - The Trump Administration said in an executive order on Wednesday that it is considering revoking the American Bar Association’s status as the federally recognized accreditor of law schools, a change that could impact lawyer licensing, student loans and attorney mobility, legal education experts said.

President Donald Trump said he was directing Education Secretary Linda McMahon to assess whether to suspend or terminate the ABA as the government’s official law school accreditor, citing its “unlawful ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ requirements,” as part of an executive order focused on reforming higher education accreditation. The order also calls for a similar review of two medical school accrediting bodies.

The ABA did not provide comment on the order.

Trump’s order followed a similar warning by U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi in March which had said that the government could revoke the ABA’s accreditor status. The U.S. Department of Education has recognized the ABA as the accreditor of law schools since 1952.

Bondi said in a March letter to the ABA that she wanted it to repeal its law school diversity rule and scrap a planned revision. The ABA’s Council of the Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar suspended the diversity rule in February.

A national accreditation system like the ABA's gives law graduates more mobility and “protects the public as well as the substantial investments law students make in legal education,” said Kellye Testy, executive director of the Association of American Law Schools.

A single accreditation system enables law graduates to work in any state and in rural areas that don't have a law school, Testy said.

If the ABA loses its accreditation status, it could lead to a "patchwork of licensure requirements," said Austen Parrish, dean of the University of California, Irvine School of Law. The vast majority of states currently require law students to graduate from an ABA-accredited law school in order to sit for the bar exam.

The high courts in Texas and Florida have both said in recent weeks that they are reviewing their ABA-graduation requirement, with the Florida justices citing the ABA’s former law school diversity and inclusion rule.

Having to meet different requirements from multiple accreditors and states would be a headache for law schools, said Stetson University Law Dean Benjamin Barros. It’s also unclear whether any other accreditor would step in to oversee law schools, he added.

“If not the ABA, then who?” Barros said. “Having that national standard is really important.”

Student loan access could also be affected. College and professional degree students must attend accredited programs in order to be eligible for federal student loans. The vast majority of the nation’s 195 ABA-accredited law schools get their federal loan eligibility through the accreditation of their central universities, not the ABA. But 13 standalone law schools, which aren’t part of larger universities, use their independent ABA accreditation for federal loan eligibility as of July, Education Department data show.

If the ABA loses its accreditation authority, those independent schools, which include Brooklyn Law School and Southwestern Law School, would likely need to seek approval from other accreditors in order for their students to qualify for federal loans, Barros said.

Read more:

US Attorney General presses ABA to drop law school DEI rule or risk losing accreditor status

Texas high court considers dropping ABA accreditation as requirement to practice law