Should the American Bar Association Be the Sole Accrediting Authority for U.S. Law Schools?

For more than a century, the American Bar Association has played a central role in shaping legal education in the United States through its authority to accredit law schools. ABA accreditation is widely regarded as the gold standard: graduates of ABA accredited schools are eligible to sit for the bar examination in all U.S. jurisdictions, and accreditation is often viewed as a proxy for institutional legitimacy and educational quality.

Yet in recent years, critics have questioned whether a single private professional organization should retain exclusive control over accreditation in a diverse, evolving legal education landscape. The debate raises fundamental questions about educational quality, access to the profession, innovation, and regulatory accountability.

The Case for Exclusive ABA Accreditation

1. National Uniformity and Portability

A single accrediting authority ensures consistent national standards. ABA accreditation provides law schools, students, employers, and licensing bodies with a shared benchmark for curriculum, faculty qualifications, library resources, academic rigor, and student services. This uniformity promotes geographic mobility, allowing graduates to practice across state lines without concerns about the legitimacy of their education.

2. Protection of Students and the Public

ABA standards are designed to protect students from substandard programs and safeguard the public by ensuring that future lawyers receive adequate training. Requirements related to bar passage rates, learning outcomes, and academic support serve as quality controls that help prevent the proliferation of diploma mill law schools.

3. Independence from Government Control

As a private professional organization, the ABA operates at arm’s length from direct political control. This independence arguably insulates legal education from shifting political priorities and preserves professional self-regulation, a longstanding tradition in American law.

4. Established Infrastructure and Expertise

The ABA’s accreditation system is mature, detailed, and well resourced. It benefits from decades of experience, peer review, site inspections, and ongoing compliance monitoring. Creating parallel accrediting bodies could duplicate costs and introduce confusion without guaranteeing improved outcomes.

The Case Against a Single Accrediting Authority

1. Barriers to Innovation

Critics argue that ABA standards can be overly prescriptive, discouraging experimentation with alternative models of legal education. Requirements concerning faculty tenure, credit hours, physical libraries, and instructional formats may inhibit online programs, competency based education, or apprenticeship style training better suited to modern legal practice.

2. Cost and Access Concerns

Compliance with ABA standards is expensive, and those costs are often passed on to students in the form of higher tuition. At a time when law school debt is widely viewed as a barrier to entry, particularly for students from underrepresented or lower-income backgrounds, exclusive accreditation may unintentionally restrict access to the profession.

3. Concentration of Regulatory Power

Granting a single private organization exclusive accreditation authority raises governance concerns. Critics question whether the ABA, as a professional association representing lawyers, law schools, and legal academics, faces inherent conflicts of interest when regulating institutions that also supply its membership.

4. Limited Accountability and Competition

In most sectors of higher education, multiple recognized accrediting bodies exist, fostering competition and alternative pathways to quality assurance. A monopoly accreditor may lack incentives to adapt quickly, respond to criticism, or recalibrate standards in light of changing market needs and technological developments.

Possible Middle-Ground Approaches

Rather than choosing between exclusivity and deregulation, policymakers could consider hybrid solutions:

Multiple Recognized Accreditors: Allow additional accrediting bodies, subject to federal or state recognition, to operate alongside the ABA, particularly for innovative or specialized programs.
Outcome-Based Standards: Shift emphasis from rigid inputs (such as seat-time or faculty structure) to demonstrable outcomes like bar passage rates, employment results, and demonstrated competencies.
State Level Experimentation: Permit states to approve alternative pathways to bar eligibility while retaining ABA accreditation as one, but not the only, route.

Why Law Librarians and Legal Researchers Should Care

The question of whether the American Bar Association should remain the sole accrediting authority for U.S. law schools is not merely an academic or regulatory issue. It has direct, practical implications for law librarians, legal researchers, and the institutions they serve.

1. Research Training and Information Literacy
Accreditation standards influence how legal research is taught. ABA requirements have long shaped expectations around research instruction, faculty expertise, and access to authoritative legal resources. Any shift toward alternative accrediting bodies, or outcome-based standards, could change how research competencies are defined, assessed, and supported.

2. Law Libraries as Accreditation Infrastructure
Law libraries remain central to accreditation compliance, from collections and licensing to instructional support and academic integrity. Changes in accreditation models could affect funding priorities, staffing models, physical vs. digital collections, and the librarian’s role in curriculum design and assessment.

3. Equity, Access, and Professional Gatekeeping
Librarians are often on the front lines of access to justice and diversity initiatives. Accreditation rules that affect tuition, program models, and entry pathways into the profession have downstream consequences for who becomes a lawyer, and whose voices are represented in legal discourse and scholarship.

4. Credential Evaluation and Research Guidance
Legal researchers routinely assess the credibility of institutions, scholarship, and authors. A more pluralistic accreditation system would require librarians to help users navigate differing credentials, degrees, and institutional standards, much as they already do with international law schools or nontraditional programs.

5. The Future of Legal Information Work
As legal education evolves, through online instruction, AI-assisted research, and skills based training, librarians are uniquely positioned to evaluate whether new models enhance or erode research rigor. Accreditation debates provide a critical forum for librarians to assert their expertise in defining what “quality” legal education truly requires.

Bottom line:
Accreditation shapes the ecosystem in which legal research is taught, practiced, preserved, and evaluated. For law librarians and legal researchers, engagement with this debate is not optional, it is essential to safeguarding both the integrity and the future relevance of the profession.

Conclusion

Whether the American Bar Association should remain the sole accrediting authority for U.S. law schools ultimately turns on how the legal profession balances quality control with innovation, access, and accountability. The ABA’s role has undoubtedly contributed to the stability and credibility of American legal education. At the same time, emerging challenges, rising costs, evolving practice models, and technological disruption, suggest that perhaps a more pluralistic or flexible accreditation system may better serve future lawyers and the public they will serve.

A serious, evidence based discussion of accreditation reform is not an attack on standards, but an acknowledgment that standards themselves must evolve.

Selected References & Further Reading

The following sources provide legal, policy, and scholarly context for evaluating whether the American Bar Association should remain the sole accrediting authority for U.S. law schools. Together, they address accreditation standards, antitrust concerns, access to justice implications, and proposals for reform.

Core ABA Sources

American Bar Association, Standards and Rules of Procedure for Approval of Law Schools.
Authoritative statement of current accreditation requirements governing curriculum, faculty, libraries, outcomes, and compliance.
https://www.americanbar.org/groups/legal_education/resources/standards/
American Bar Association Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar, ABA Law School Accreditation.
Overview of the accreditation process, site evaluations, and continuing review mechanisms.
https://www.americanbar.org/groups/legal_education/
Speculation swirls over what law school accreditation might look like if states break away from ABA, By Julianne Hill.

Government and Regulatory Perspectives

U.S. Department of Education, Nationally Recognized Accrediting Agencies.
Explains the federal framework for recognizing accreditors and the policy rationale for multiple accrediting bodies in higher education.
https://www.ed.gov/accreditation
U.S. Department of Justice, Antitrust statements and correspondence regarding ABA accreditation practices (various filings).
DOJ commentary has periodically raised concerns about whether exclusive accreditation may restrain competition or innovation in legal education.

Scholarly and Policy Commentary

Brian Z. Tamanaha, Failing Law Schools (University of Chicago Press, 2012).
Influential critique of the ABA accreditation regime’s role in rising tuition, institutional uniformity, and market distortion.
Heritage Foundation, How to Break the American Bar Association’s Accreditation Monopoly.
Access, Innovation, and Alternative Pathways
- Conference of Chief Justices, Resolutions on Legal Education and Bar Admission.
  Addresses state experimentation with nontraditional pathways to bar eligibility.
- Deborah Jones Merritt, “What We Know About the Bar Exam,” University of Denver Law Review.
  Useful for understanding how accreditation standards intersect with bar passage, assessment, and competency-based education.