If you go back to the early 20th century, people who wanted a career in the law did not have to go to law school at all, much less one meeting the standards of the American Bar Association. Then, starting in the 1920s, the ABA decided that it had to “improve” legal education, and it flexed its muscles to get states to enact laws making it mandatory for prospective lawyers to graduate from an ABA-approved law school before they could take the bar exam. The supposed need for higher quality was, of course, merely a smokescreen for the usual special interest group motive — suppressing competition.

A controversy has arisen in Texas, where the state’s supreme court asked for input in the question of maintaining the ABA’s monopoly on accreditation of law schools. I weigh on on the side of dumping the ABA (and going even further) in today’s Martin Center article.

A number of law school deans in the state have predictably claimed that without the ABA, law schools would decline in quality. But I cite several disinterested professors who argue that all ABA accreditation does is to raise costs and restrict schools’ ability to innovate. But for the ABA requirement, law school could cost substantially less and that would help ease the problem that many poorer people can’t afford legal help when they need it.

Furthermore, the ABA has been pushing law schools to embrace leftist “diversity” notions. As Ilya Shapiro comments, “Beyond its judicial evaluations, the ABA has used its accreditation monopoly to bend law schools to its ideological will. For example, in February 2022, the ABA instituted a new rule that all law schools must ‘provide education on bias, cross-cultural competency, and racism’ through compulsory ‘orientation sessions, lectures, courses, or other educational experiences’.”

The ABA’s standards are just a high, artificial barrier to entry and Texas (and other states) should junk them.

I argue that no accreditation is necessary because every law school has sound incentives to do the best possible job of preparing students for the next step, namely the bar exam.