Remember when the American Bar Association finally axed its standard requiring law schools to demonstrate a “commitment to diversity and inclusion” to qualify for accreditation? It turns out that was only part of its DEI-based requirements for law schools. That standard—Standard 206 of the ABA’s Standards and Rules of Procedure for Approval of Law Schools—was suspended in February 2025 amid mounting legal and political pressure. But the ABA kept intact Standard 303(c), which requires law schools to “provide education to law students on bias, cross-cultural competency, and racism” at least twice before a student graduates. After years of defying the Supreme Court’s ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College (2023), the ABA feigned compliance by revoking Standard 206. A report issued in April by Defending Education reveals that was all a ruse.
The downstream consequences of Standard 303(c) are exactly what you would expect. Defending Education found that 62 law schools across 28 states and the District of Columbia still appear to require DEI-related coursework or programming as a condition of graduating. At the University of Wisconsin, first-year law students were required to attend a “re-orientation” session that involved reviewing a document on “28 Common Racist Attitudes and Behaviors” and completing a worksheet asking them to reflect on how deeply racism runs in their own lives—a session a UW-Madison spokesman confirmed “was held in partial fulfillment of” Standard 303(c).
At UC Berkeley, law students must complete courses “that substantially focus on how laws and legal institutions shape and are shaped by racism and other forms of systemic inequality.” At Rutgers Law School, a formal “Racial Equity Requirement” mandates coursework addressing “Discrimination, oppression, and/or systemic bias based on race.” Loyola University Chicago School of Law goes further still, stating in its handbook that its mission is to “prepare graduates who will be ethical advocates for justice and equity” and “who will lead efforts to dismantle the legal, economic, political, and social structures that generate and sustain racism.” These are not isolated examples. They are the predictable results of a mandatory accreditation standard built around ideological conformity.
Compounding the problem is a transparent pattern of cosmetic rebranding. Among the 72 law schools that still maintain DEI offices or their functional equivalents, many simply changed the names. Drake University Law School calls its DEI operation “Collaborative Culture.” Villanova Law’s DEI page was rechristened “Unitas: Community Building.” But the site itself still plainly stated that the school is “deeply committed to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI)”—until that phrase was removed in the page’s most recent version. This is not reform. It is camouflage.
The deeper problem is structural. A Wall Street Journal editorial observed how the leftist ABA’s “near monopoly on law-school accreditation” translates to “the standards and expectations” of the accreditor becoming “entrenched, along with political bias. Law schools have incentive to align themselves with what they think the ABA wants.” When one organization controls access to the legal profession, its ideological priorities become the profession’s ideological priorities.
Goal III of the four goals in the ABA’s stated mission is to “Eliminate Bias and Enhance Diversity.” The organization has further asserted that “all ABA entities and members are responsible for advancing ABA Goal III—it permeates everything we do internally and externally as an Association.” That translates to antipathy toward color-blindness in favor of the discriminatory practices that have been a priority of the Left. Not surprisingly, the ABA has defended critical race theory in print, filed an amicus brief in Students for Fair Admissions urging the continued use of race in college admissions, and currently offers courses teaching lawyers how to maintain DEI initiatives in the face of the Trump administration’s reform agenda. Needless to say, this is not the posture of a neutral professional body.
Relief may be coming. The Federal Trade Commission has previously criticized the ABA’s accreditation monopoly as “inimical to the principles on which competition law rest[s].” Texas, Florida, and Alabama have already decided to end the ABA’s stranglehold on law school accreditation (with the latter two taking effect in the near future), and Tennessee and Ohio are considering the same step. The Department of Education’s National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity is slated to review the ABA’s federal recognition at its upcoming summer meeting—a review that cannot come soon enough.
The ABA already lost its privileged role in evaluating judicial nominees because it could not keep politics out of the process. It is now on the same trajectory as an accreditor. Suspending Standard 206 while leaving Standard 303(c) untouched was never genuine compliance—it was a calculated bet that a partial concession would quiet the critics. The Defending Education report makes clear the bet has failed. The ABA has proven to be anything but nonpartisan, and it clearly has taken its monopoly on law school accreditation for granted. Policymakers should act accordingly.