The American Bar Association held a vote today and decided to do away with a DEI requirement that was part of its requirements for accrediting schools.
The American Bar Association, the lawyers group that sets standards for the legal profession, eliminated on Tuesday a diversity requirement for law schools after facing pressure from the Trump administration.
The bar association said that the diversity requirement could jeopardize its role as an accreditor that oversees nearly 200 juris doctorate programs.
The association’s mandate had said that law schools should demonstrate by “concrete action” a commitment to diversity and inclusion, including having a diverse faculty and student body. The bar association did not tell schools how to meet the requirement but said that to be accredited, schools would be judged “on the totality of the law school’s actions and the results achieved.” It was originally adopted in 1980 and had been in its current form since 2014.
It was known as Standard 206:
Known as Standard 206, the accreditation council’s quality metric for an inclusive student body has gone through several iterations, beginning in the 1970s and early 1980s—when civil rights groups and the federal government were pressuring law schools to address their overwhelmingly white, male student bodies and affirmative action was at its prime. The council later added a second subsection requiring a similar commitment to diversity in the composition of faculty and staff.
The backstory to today's decision really began with the Supreme Court's decision ending affirmative action. That decision was focused on using race as a factor in admissions but it should have given a hint to all colleges that decisions based on race (beyond admissions) were not a good idea.
But Standard 206 continued to be the norm until April 2025 when the Trump administration put out an executive order titled "Reforming Accreditation to Strengthen Higher Education." Here's a bit of what it said.
Notwithstanding this slide in graduation rates and graduates’ performance in the labor market, the spike in debt obligations in relation to expected earnings, and repayment rates on student loans, accreditors have remained improperly focused on compelling adoption of discriminatory ideology, rather than on student outcomes. Some accreditors make the adoption of unlawfully discriminatory practices a formal standard of accreditation, and therefore a condition of accessing Federal aid, through “diversity, equity, and inclusion” or “DEI”-based standards of accreditation that require institutions to “share results on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in the context of their mission by considering . . . demographics . . . and resource allocation.” Accreditors have also abused their governance standards to intrude on State and local authority.
The American Bar Association’s Council of the Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar (Council), which is the sole federally recognized accreditor for Juris Doctor programs, has required law schools to “demonstrate by concrete action a commitment to diversity and inclusion” including by “commit[ting] to having a student body [and faculty] that is diverse with respect to gender, race, and ethnicity.” As the Attorney General has concluded and informed the Council, the discriminatory requirement blatantly violates the Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, 600 U.S. 181 (2023). Though the Council subsequently suspended its enforcement while it considers proposed revisions, this standard and similar unlawful mandates must be permanently eradicated.
The ABA suspended the use of Standard 206 at that time but hadn't actually removed it from its standards until today. Needless to say, there was opposition to this outcome.
...supporters, including a number of law school deans and faculty members, say that view applies an overreaching interpretation of the court’s order. Ensuring diversity in the legal sector is critical to the health of American democracy, some proponents say, since attorneys—who are often architects and enforcers of the law—should accurately represent the demographics of the national population.
It's clear that the ABA's goal is to avoid losing its clout as the group which oversees the accreditation of law schools. But just because they have belatedly removed Standard 206 does not guarantee they'll keep their position with regard to accreditation.
“It’s the big question: Is repealing the diversity standard enough? Is it timely enough? And does the Trump administration trust that there is actually the level of independence that is being claimed?” said Peter Lake, a law professor and director of the Center for Excellence in Higher Education Law and Policy at Stetson University.
“That could be decisive in terms of whether the ABA can maintain its pre-eminent role in accreditation of law schools,” he explained. “But it may be too little, too late. This may be a fait accompli for Trump and nothing that the ABA will do will actually satisfy this administration.”
The Trump administration has already taken steps in that direction. This report is from last month.
On Friday, the Education Department is taking the first step toward removing the ABA’s authority to accredit law schools, said David Barker, assistant secretary of education...
The recommendation to reject the ABA is accompanied by a nearly 500-page Education Department report, more than a year in the making. It asserts that the ABA’s accreditation wing isn’t sufficiently independent of its profession. That independence is designed to ensure the accreditor focuses on education quality.
“We have said many times that accreditation, in general, operates like a cartel,” 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.”
So this really may be too little, too late for the ABA. We'll have to wait and see what happens next.
Editor's Note: President Trump is fighting to ensure America's kids get the education they deserve.
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