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I joined the International Bar Association not only to practice International law but also because of perceived bias and internal workings of the ABA – American Bar Association and the CalBar – California Bar Association, and I never regretted a day!

For more than seven decades, the American Bar Association has held a near-monopoly as the only federally recognized accreditor of U.S. law schools. That exclusive status, first granted by the Department of Education in 1952, has given the ABA extraordinary power over who may train the next generation of lawyers. It is time to break that monopoly.

The Trump administration’s April 2025 executive order directing Education Secretary Linda McMahon to review whether the ABA’s recognition should be suspended or terminated correctly identified a long-overdue problem: an organization that has used its gatekeeping authority to impose ideological requirements rather than focus solely on educational quality.

Graduates need assurance that their degrees meet rigorous standards, and the public needs confidence that licensed attorneys received a sound legal education.

The problem is that a single private organization has been allowed to set those standards for the entire nation while embedding contested social policies into the process. The ABA’s diversity, equity, and inclusion rules became a flashpoint precisely because they functioned as de facto mandates. Even after the ABA’s Council of the Section of Legal Education suspended enforcement of its DEI rule in early 2025 under pressure from Attorney General Pam Bondi, the underlying structural problem remained: one group still controlled the keys to federal recognition, bar eligibility in most states, and, for a handful of independent law schools, access to student loans.

A healthier system would introduce competition and pluralism into accreditation. Other professional associations, regional higher-education accreditors, or newly formed legal-education bodies should be allowed to seek federal recognition alongside or instead of the ABA. States such as Texas and Florida have already begun examining whether to drop the ABA-graduation requirement for bar admission. Those reviews signal a broader recognition that a one-size-fits-all national standard controlled by a single organization no longer serves the profession or the public.

Kamala Harris is a California attorney, and she passed the California Bar Exam, yet she can’t even speak intelligently, and her words are nothing less than word salads! Can anyone explain how she is a CalBar-approved and ABA Law School graduate? Something stinks!

Critics warn that multiple accreditors could create a confusing patchwork of standards, reduce graduate mobility, and complicate federal student-loan eligibility. Those concerns are legitimate and solvable. Clear minimum federal criteria for educational quality, bar-passage rates, and financial transparency can be set by the Department of Education without outsourcing policy judgments about race, gender, or ideology to any private group.

Law schools that meet those baseline standards through any recognized accreditor could still qualify graduates for multistate practice and federal aid. Standalone schools currently reliant on ABA recognition alone would simply seek approval from another recognized body.

The ABA’s long dominance has produced inertia and groupthink. Opening the field to additional accreditors would force every participant to justify its standards on the merits of legal education rather than political fashion. Students, universities, and state supreme courts would gain meaningful choices. Most importantly, the profession would reclaim a measure of independence from a single organization’s worldview.

Overhauling the ABA’s exclusive role and inviting other associations into the accreditation process is the only way to restore accountability, viewpoint diversity, and genuine academic rigor to the training of American lawyers.

I earned my Juris Doctor degree in law from Trinity Law School, with a focus on International law. Trinity Law School is affiliated with Trinity International University (TIU). Established: 1897, Bannockburn/Deerfield, Illinois (historic primary campus). TIU holds institutional accreditation from the Higher Learning Commission (HLC). Trinity Evangelical Divinity School is accredited by the Association of Theological Schools (ATS). The Master of Arts in Mental Health Counseling holds accreditation from CACREP. Trinity Law School holds accreditation from the Committee of Bar Examiners of the State Bar of California.