By Ilya Shapiro

Written by Ilya Shapiro

Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes

The American Bar Association has become just another left-wing interest group and doesn’t deserve its central role in legal education.

This week, an obscure federal body called the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity—quite a mouthful, so call it NACIQI—held a hearing on whether to recommend to the Department of Education to renew recognition of the American Bar Association as law-school accreditor. (I’ve written in the past about the ABA’s role in the illiberal takeover of legal education and why it doesn’t deserve its monopoly over law-school accreditation, including an entire chapter in my last book Lawless.) NACIQI ultimately deadlocked 8-8 on the question, which means competing motions to (1) continue recognition for 12 months while requiring corrective action and (2) deny renewal both failed—so now the secretary of education will have to decide without any official recommendation. I was supposed to testify, but the hearing went off the rails and couldn’t stick to the timing of its planned agenda, so I had to catch a plane and was in the air for the entirety of the period they entertained third-party comments. But here’s the testimony I was expecting to give. —IS

Good morning. I am Ilya Shapiro, director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute and author of Lawless: The Miseducation of America’s Elites.

I urge NACIQI to recommend denial of the ABA Council’s petition for renewed recognition. The Department staff report reaches the same conclusion, finding that the Council failed to demonstrate compliance with numerous federal criteria.[1]

First, Section 602.14 requires the accreditor to be “separate and independent” from its affiliated membership organization. The regulation specifically demands independent selection of decision-makers, separately paid dues, and budgetary autonomy. Department staff found that the Council failed to provide approved bylaws and other documentation needed to establish compliance.[2]

That omission is hardly academic. Last month, the ABA House of Delegates refused to concur in the Council’s repeal of Standard 206, delaying the change and requiring another Council vote. The episode shows why the Council must demonstrate—rather than merely assert—its independence from the politically active organization that houses it.[3]

Second, Section 602.21(c) provides that once an accreditor determines that a standard needs changing, it “must initiate action within 12 months” and finish in a reasonable time. After Students for Fair Admissions changed affirmative-action law in June 2023, the Council acknowledged that it would need to revise Standard 206. Yet it continued training reviewers and evaluating schools under that standard through the 2024–25 cycle. It suspended the rule only in February 2025 and repealed it only this month. Department staff correctly found that this record fails the regulatory timetable.[4]

Third, Section 602.16 requires clear standards for student achievement, expressly including licensing examinations. Yet staff found that the Council failed to produce the studies supporting its chosen bar-passage benchmark. The Council has been quicker to prescribe ideological inputs than to justify the outcomes by which legal education should be judged.[5]

Standard 303(c), for example, still compels every law school to provide education on “bias, cross-cultural competency, and racism.” The Council’s own Standards Committee now concedes that this rule fails to build the intended skills, imposes a particular curricular input without measuring results, conflicts with some state laws, and creates unjustified burdens. Section 602.21 requires standards to be adequate measures of educational quality and relevant to students’ educational needs. The Council’s own assessment shows that this mandate fails that test.[6]

This is part of a long pattern. Two decades ago, the Council repeatedly withheld reaccreditation from George Mason despite active minority recruitment, pressuring it to lower admissions standards and adopt larger racial preferences. The result, as Gail Heriot documented, was severe academic failure among students supposedly helped.[7] For example, from 2003 through 2005, 45 percent of its African American students experienced academic failure, compared with 4 percent of other students. Federal recognition magnifies the consequences of such ideological coercion.[8]

These failures carry unusual consequences. In nearly every jurisdiction, an ABA-accredited degree is the ticket to the bar exam. For some freestanding schools, accreditation also gates federal student aid. The Council exercises enormous government-backed power over legal education.[9]

In sum, the ABA Council has had ample warning and ample time. Its 11th-hour changes do not establish compliance. I respectfully urge NACIQI to adopt the Department staff recommendation and deny renewed recognition.

-Ilya Shapiro

Ilya Shapiro is a Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow and Director of Constitutional Studies. author of Lawless: The Miseducation of America’s Elites (2025), Supreme Disorder: Judicial Nominations and the Politics of America’s Highest Court (2020) Shapiro’s Gavel on Substack. Visit HERE to learn more.

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