ABA Legal Ed council will stand up new committee examining accreditation standards
The council of the ABA Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar will take a deep look at its law school accreditation standards as it deferred a decision on the wording of a proposed nondiscrimination standard.
During its quarterly meeting Friday in San Francisco, the council announced the creation of an advisory committee comprising state supreme court members, deans and other stakeholders.
“The council will undertake a comprehensive review of the standards to ensure full alignment with our recently adopted core principles and values,” wrote Jennifer L. Rosato Perea, managing director accreditation and legal education for the ABA, in a statement. “This process acknowledges recent calls to reduce burdens on law schools and will seek to preserve the baseline quality of education that the standards facilitate while allowing law schools to appropriately innovate.”
The review will include a look at standards related to faculty tenure and experiential learning, she wrote.
Bumping up experiential learning requirements from six to 12 has been a hot topic. A May 2 proposal impacting Standards 303, 304 and 311 met fierce opposition. One letter signed by 52 deans of ABA-accredited law schools requested that the council slow down and make incremental changes, as law schools are already facing funding cuts and several other challenges.
Despite support from the Clinical Legal Education Association, the Society of American Law Teachers and Deborah Jones Merritt, a professor emerita at the Ohio State University Moritz College of Law, the proposal was withdrawn in August. She is also a 2025 ABA Journal Legal Rebel.
The section’s council, a separate and independent entity from the bar association, is recognized by the U.S. Department of Education as the sole accrediting body for domestic law schools. Most states require applicants to the state bar to be graduates of an ABA-accredited law school. Ohio, Tennessee, Texas and Florida are reconsidering those requirements.
Earlier this year, executive orders from the Trump administration mandated the dismantling of diversity, equity and inclusion efforts and demands by the Department of Education that academic institutions eliminate DEI policies or risk federal funding cuts.
Those orders direct the secretary of the Education Department to deny, suspend or terminate an accreditor’s recognition if they take into account a school’s diversity. The secretary must “realign” accreditation by requiring universities to use student outcome data without referring to demographic data, according to the April 23 executive order. Additionally, that order demands universities to “prioritize intellectual diversity” among faculty.
In response, the council suspended enforcement of the contentious standard until Aug. 31, 2026.
Last week, the standards committee proposed revisions to Standard 205 to eliminate language specifying current diversity criteria, such as race and ethnicity, religion, gender and gender identity, sexual orientation, national origin, age, disability or military status from nondiscrimination statements. In addition, the committee suggested adding disclosures regarding all state and local nondiscrimination laws to law school websites.
But the council kicked both DEI-related recommendations back to the standards committee because of “the complexity of these issues and the need for further reflection and deliberation,” Rosato Perea wrote.
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