Behold: The Rise and Fall of the American Bar Association.
I’ve prepared a terrific special edition about the poor American Bar Association, which is having a difficult week. Of course, the truth is, this is one of the most important stories going, if you measure it by long-term impact. Maybe nothing is more important than this
Some of the most poignant cautionary stories fall into a narrative archetype called the fall from grace. In real life, no other institutional group has fallen further and faster than the ABA, a national lawyers’ guild that since 1953 has been trusted with the keys to the country’s legal and political kingdoms. The ABA had it all. On Friday, the Wall Street Journal reported the latest bad news: “Trump Administration Attacks Bar Association’s Power to Accredit Law Schools.
The ABA —the “world’s largest voluntary lawyers’ association”— is arguably one of the most politically powerful groups in America, next to the two major parties themselves. It does not merely lobby; it helps determine who can become a lawyer, what law schools must teach and value, which institutions can tap federal student-loan money, and which judicial nominees get the green light of the profession’s seal of approval.
JEFF CHILDERS
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The ABA —the “world’s largest voluntary lawyers’ association”— is arguably one of the most politically powerful groups in America, next to the two major parties themselves. It does not merely lobby; it helps determine who can become a lawyer, what law schools must teach and value, which institutions can tap federal student-loan money, and which judicial nominees get the green light of the profession’s seal of approval.
The weirdest thing about this bizarre arrangement is that nobody ever voted for this regulatory empire. The ABA’s powers come from a bunch of antique delegations of authority from the government to a private membership association of lawyers. It was the original poisonous flower of credentialism. Let the experts handle it.
?? Trouble in paradise. On August 21, 1878, seventy-five lawyers from twenty states and the District of Columbia strolled into the town-hall courtroom in Saratoga Springs —a spa town— and founded the American Bar Association. The legal profession as we know it today barely existed at that time. There was no national code of ethics, no national bar organization, no standards for law schools— indeed, most lawyers were still sole practitioners trained at someone else’s desk.
After Saratoga, things changed quickly. By 1921, the group had published the nation’s first set of standards for law schools. By 1952, the ABA became the sole decision-maker allowed to pick which law schools were suitable for licensing new lawyers (i.e., accredited).
Starting around the same time, under Eisenhower, the ABA began rating the President’s judicial nominees and, to do so, got an unprecedented ‘first look’ at classified background-check material on every nominee. In a 1987 article about conservative Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork, the UPI correctly noted, “For many years, the ABA committee had virtual veto power over nominees.” Everyone knew that a ‘not-qualified’ rating from the ABA would usually sink a nomination.
In other words, the group became the gatekeeper for every lawyer and judge in the country. They ruled the roost. For a long time, the group’s politics remained quietly conservative to non-partisan. They stuck to the law, not policy.
The ABA’s leftward lurch seems to have begun late in the Cold War, when, in 1981, the group expressly began targeting “diversity goals” for its own organizational aims as well as for the legal profession as a whole. By 1996, it had published “diversity standards” for law school faculty and staff.
There were warning signs, red flags, but the ABA felt confident.
The ABA pushed past many warnings that, by playing politics, it was playing with fire. Although ABA’s initial diversity program was still largely under the radar, Republicans were furious that the ABA had single-handedly scuttled Robert Bork’s nomination in 1987.
Bork was widely considered a legal genius. But the ABA called him “not qualified”— only because of his conservative political positions. So Republicans coined a whole new term for a targeted political assassination: being “Borked.” It was considered such a raw, partisan abuse of power that, in 2001, George W. Bush’s Administration suspended the ABA’s ‘first look’ privilege for the first time in history. Obama put it back. Trump 1.0 canceled it again.
Throughout this period and to this day, the ABA has continued to rate nominees. But it no longer gets FBI background material.
It wasn’t always Republicans. In 1995, even the Clinton DOJ prosecuted the ABA over its monopolistic accreditation privilege, arguing that the group had misused its power, thereby raising costs and picking winners and losers. That prosecution ended in a settlement and consent decree— which led to a second prosecution in 2006 for violating the terms of the original consent decree. It paid a fine.
Then came the straw that would eventually break the ABA’s back. The straw was named peak woke.
In 2014, emboldened by ascendant wokeness, the ABA really started throwing its purple-haired, morbidly obese weight around. It unveiled “Standard 206,” a brand-new requirement that accredited law schools “demonstrate by concrete action” —not just pretty words— their commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion. Silence is violence! Use your privilege! Do the work!
In many red states, Standard 206 blatantly violated state laws forbidding consideration of race or gender in college admissions. So Republican states complained.
“Whatever the intent behind Standard 206 might be, it cannot lawfully be implemented in its current or revised forms,” a coalition of 21 Republican state attorneys general tried to explain. But the ABA ignored those requests to modify the Standard to conform to state laws. Instead, last year on February 14, 2025, it defiantly issued ‘Interpretation 206-1,’ which declared that any state constitutional provision or statute that “purports” to prohibit consideration of race, gender, ethnicity, or national origin did not justify a school’s failure to comply with Standard 206. The Standard had reached the apogee of its power.
But just seven days later, the ABA would turn on a dime and suspend enforcement of the Standard.
?? To understand how this schizophrenic reversal happened, we must rewind a little. Pressure from the right against Standard 206 grew increasingly intense after the Supreme Court decided Students for Fair Admissions (SFA) in 2023, which made racial and gender quotas and preferences illegal in college admissions.
Following the landmark 2023 decision, the ABA began “revisiting” Standard 206, using clever wordplay to keep the Standard’s diversity mandates by ditching the explicit use of words like “race” or “gender.” Critics responded fiercely. The pressure grew so intense that by February, 2025, two weeks after issuing Interpretation 206-1, the ABA abruptly suspended enforcement of the Standard— all in the first month after President Trump was sworn in.
It was also right after Pam Bondi was appointed. She made it painfully clear the Trump 2.0 Administration was gunning for the nation’s oldest lawyers’ guild, and the woke, Supreme Court-defying Standard provided a giant target. “The Standard must be repealed in its entirety. Any requirement that law schools demonstrate ‘a commitment to diversity’ is deeply problematic,” said then-Attorney General Pam Bondi. She was right.
Then dominoes started falling even faster. Pick your metaphor. The chickens were coming home to roost. The backlash was swelling to impressive size and girth. By January of this year, Florida and Texas completed months-long review processes and became the first US states since 1953 to reject the ABA as the sole accreditor of their law schools. Headline from Best Law Schools:
The Wall Street Journal and nearly every other platform blame the ABA’s woes on one allegedly orange man. But the biggest evidence of the ABA’s incipient dissolution arrived even before Trump’s re-election.
By 2015, the ABA claimed 400,000 lawyers and judges as members. Professionally speaking, when I became a lawyer, the safest thing was to be an ABA member and carry its fake little ‘bar card.’ But by 2024, just nine years from the peak, its reported membership had free-fallen to 227,000— a stomach-churning 43% drop. During the same nine years, the number of credentialed lawyers in the US rose from 1.35 to 1.37 million.
The loss of members has been catastrophic. It has required the organization to fundamentally change the way it does business, now relying more on grants from political groups and the federal government (“more than half”) than on dues from members. Bloomberg Law, November 2023:
Horses and Barns. This summer, in 2026, a chastened ABA finally proposed repealing Standard 206, so that it could assure all the states and regulators that it is finally complying with the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2023 SFA decision. The process has been so rich with bureaucratic maneuvering that would make the late Soviet Central Committee proud.
Earlier this year, an ‘independent ABA committee’ tasked with considering the issue formally recommended that Standard 206 be repealed. But the House of Delegates quickly voted down the committee’s recommendation by a lopsided 48-2. However, minutes after that vote, the Delegates also quietly passed a rider giving the committee the power to repeal the Standard on its own, without further House approval. Eureka! Blame, shifted!
As of this month, August, the political hot potato is back in the committee’s reluctant hands. They vote again by Zoom on September 8th. It looks like the committee members will become the scapegoats, bearing the brunt of diversity activists’ wrath.
Which brings us to this week’s news. The ABA is trying to polish up its resume to hang onto all its remaining privileges. But it is getting very late in the day.
“On Friday, the Education Department took the first step toward removing the ABA’s authority to accredit law schools,” the Journal reported. Assuming the process completes successfully, this would be the federal version of what Texas and Florida have already done. De-certifying the ABA as the sole federal law school accrediting agency would trigger a long list of consequences, including ineligibility for grants and even student loans. (Recall that federal grants are now over 50% of the ABA’s revenue.)
A 500-page Dept. of Education report issued at the same time argued that the ABA has an anti-competitive monopoly and that it hurts consumers. “We have said many times that accreditation, in general, operates like a cartel,” assistant secretary of education David Barker said. “When there’s no competition, accreditors feel free to inject their own political preferences, their own ideologies into the work that they do.”
What media seems unwilling to recognize, including the Wall Street Journal, which didn’t mention this key fact at all: ABA’s membership is bleeding out. It’s one thing to give special privileges to a group that represents most lawyers and judges. But when it only represents a shrinking slice of lawyers and judges— then how do you make the case for ABA having special rights that other groups don’t get?
Put differently, why should a shrinking voluntary association, increasingly financed through non-dues revenue and increasingly distant from the profession it purports to represent, retain monopoly-like public privileges over legal education, entry into practice, and judicial nominations?
TLDR: In the 1980’s, Democrats captured the ABA. Then they misused it for political purposes. Now it’s ruined. Democrats ruin everything they get hold of. But I digress.
?? The stakes are difficult to overestimate. Trump must win. The ABA must be destroyed as a political force, and its ability to influence the legal profession extinguished. It’s easy to understand why.
The legal pipeline controls oversized cultural and political territory. Law students become lawyers. Lawyers become judges. Judges decide lawsuits and sentence or release criminals. Judges move up to appellate positions. Appellate judges interpret or strike down the laws themselves. Then appellate judges move up to the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court interprets the Constitution. So.
If you prime the legal pipeline with mostly woke progressive nitwits, eventually you will have a majority of midwitted justices who think Constitutional norms are subjective and the nation’s founding charter is a living document that evolves to suit the political moment and defines words like a drunken CDC website manager. And when that happens, when a majority of the Supremes have spilled out of the woke-progressive-pipeline, it’s goodnight, Maria.
Which is why I invested a special edition in this story. It’s that important. And best of all, we are winning. Enjoy that thought.