Texas and Florida Shatter the ABA’s Gatekeeping Power
During the left’s infamous “march through the institutions,” it brilliantly captured organizations that held gatekeeping authority over access to careers and professions. Among these were education, journalism, and much of the fine arts, but the most important was the left’s capture of the American Bar Association. ABA accreditation of a law school has been required in all 50 states for a law school’s graduates to be able to take the bar exam.
Texas and Florida just ended the ABA’s monopoly, and not a moment too soon.
As documented by George Parry at The American Spectator last May, in 1992, “the ABA abandoned all pretense of being an apolitical professional organization and publicly emerged as a special-interest adjunct of the Democrat Party.” (READ MORE: The American Bar Association’s Day of Reckoning)
That year, the ABA took a partisan stand in favor of abortion legislation, and it presented an award to Anita Hill for her testimony against Clarence Thomas in his 1991 Supreme Court confirmation hearings. The situation only got worse from there. By 2021, to maintain accreditation, law schools had to “demonstrate by concrete action a commitment to diversity and inclusion.” This included having faculty and student bodies that were “diverse with respect to gender, race, and ethnicity.”
With the ABA’s monolithic power now weakened, it didn’t take long for the other big red state to follow Texas’s lead.
While there was some pushback against the ABA’s political agenda, its monopoly power remained unchecked. In 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that certain race-based admissions programs (at Harvard and the University of North Carolina) violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment and Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, but the ABA continued to seek workarounds to perpetuate the requirement for diversity quotas. In April 2025, President Trump issued an Executive Order barring the use of DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) as a metric in law school accreditation.
But it was the state of Texas that finally dropped the bomb that terminated the ABA’s monopoly on accreditation. This past January, Texas formally terminated the requirement that a degree from an ABA-accredited law school be required to take the state bar exam and gain admittance to the State Bar of Texas.
As documented in a piece at Insight Into Academia titled “Texas Ends ABA Accreditation Requirement for Law Schools,” the state Supreme Court will now take on the role of being the accrediting agency.
In a recent order, the Texas Supreme Court announced it will no longer require graduation from an ABA-accredited law school for admission to the Texas bar. Instead, the court will establish and maintain its own list of approved law schools — ending a 42-year arrangement under which the ABA effectively served as the gatekeeper for legal licensure in the state.
Texans rightfully trust a court elected by the citizens of Texas to do a better job in setting accreditation standards than the hyper-partisan ABA has done.
With the ABA’s monolithic power now weakened, it didn’t take long for the other big red state to follow Texas’s lead. Shortly thereafter, Florida’s Supreme Court terminated Florida’s sole reliance on the ABA for law school accreditation. As documented in a Reuters piece dated Jan. 16,
The Supreme Court of Florida said in an opinion on Thursday that it was replacing the ABA as the “sole accrediting agency” for law schools whose graduates may take the state’s bar exam, which is a requirement to practice in the state.
Graduates of ABA law schools are still eligible to take Florida’s exam, but the court said it plans to extend bar eligibility to law schools approved by other federally recognized accrediting agencies — though it noted that no such agencies currently have rules specific to law schools. The court said it will contact other accrediting agencies to gauge their interest in approving law schools.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis weighed in on X (Twitter), stating that “The (highly partisan) ABA should not be a gatekeeper for legal education or the legal profession.”
The liberation of Texas and Florida law schools from mandatory, ABA-enforced woke orthodoxy is a major milestone. Other conservative states should quickly follow suit, helping accelerate the nullification of the ABA’s authority into a broad preference cascade.
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