The GOP Is Going After the ABA. But Why?

Republicans have turned their attention to attempting to bring another organization to heel: the American Bar Association. Over the past three weeks, GOP leaders have announced two new antitrust investigations into the ABA and its accreditation arm, formally known as the Council of the Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar.

The first investigation, announced in late September by Texas Attorney General and Republican Senate candidate Ken Paxton, focuses on the council’s alleged anticompetitive actions, including “artificially inflat[ing]” the salaries of legal faculty, and establishing accreditation requirements that impose “substantial costs” on law schools and “deprive the market of innovative, lower-cost approaches to legal education.”

The second, revealed in an Oct. 7 letter from the Justice Department obtained by Inside Higher Ed, has yet to be fully launched but raises concerns about the council’s standards for faculty. In the letter, the DOJ’s antitrust division describes the council’s standards as having a “substantive preference for full-time faculty over adjunct faculty,” arguing that it restricts the supply of instructors and raises costs in an anticompetitive fashion. If the ABA doesn’t provide a sufficient response by Thursday, the DOJ said, it will take “additional investigatory steps necessary to address this apparent violation of federal antitrust law.”

Legal and policy experts say these investigations represent the latest volleys in a decades-long conflict between political conservatives and the ABA. The two parties have also recently been engaged in an ongoing dispute over the council’s status and whether it should retain federal recognition. But the feud goes well beyond the law school accreditation process, encompassing everything from the ABA’s historic vetting of Supreme Court justices to President Trump’s recent attempts to block certain law firms from working in federal courts.

And while experts largely agree that tensions are growing, they espouse different theories as to why. Some believe the animosity is rooted in ideological differences, political animosity and culture wars; others argue it is driven by market competition concerns and the desire to maintain intellectual and institutional diversity.

“It’s a complicated story,” said Barry Currier, a former ABA managing director of legal education. “And to a certain extent, it involves the whole history of the ABA.”

Neither the bar association nor the White House responded directly to Inside Higher Ed’s questions about the escalating feud. But Carla Pratt, chair of the ABA’s accreditation council, said in a statement that her agency has “advanced quality legal education” for more than 100 years.

“Above all, we will continue to pursue our primary focus: to ensure quality legal education while reducing costs and burdens on law schools that may stifle innovation,” she wrote.

A Tangled History

Regardless of its origins, the conflict has become increasingly pronounced and public since the second Trump administration took office in 2025.

Early on, the president attempted to penalize several law firms that represented clients he disagreed with, an action the bar association spoke out against and later sued the government over.

Then the White House issued an executive order aimed at reforming college accreditation and targeted the ABA accreditation council as an example of the “unlawfully discriminatory” DEI practices that it said must be eradicated.

More recently, the Education Department recommended stripping the accreditation council of federal recognition as an agency that can determine which institutions get access to federal student loans. (A final decision has yet to be made, though policy experts expect the immediate effect to be minimal, even if the Trump administration follows through.)

But the GOP’s beef with the ABA started long before Trump’s second term, multiple experts said.

Diane Auer Jones, a Republican who served in the Education Department under both George W. Bush and the first Trump administration, pointed to evidence of the conflict during her first stint in office.

At the time, President Bush frequently used a tool known as a signing statement to register his disapproval of certain parts of a law without actually vetoing it—a practice the ABA sharply opposed. Meanwhile, the education secretary, Margaret Spellings, scrutinized the ABA accreditation council’s diversity standards, requiring the accreditor to report on how it applied the standards. Jones also recalled that the Education Department raised concerns about the anticompetitive nature of the council’s standards for facilities, which drove up costs by requiring law schools to refurbish their physical libraries—despite the growth in digitized legal journals.

To be sure, Republican leaders haven’t been the only ones to take issue with the ABA. Before Bush, President Clinton, a Democrat, voiced worries about the ABA, launching an antitrust investigation into the association, similar to the one Trump launched earlier this month. And the Obama administration drew newfound attention to the ABA and other programmatic accreditors by emphasizing their role in state licensure and a consequential need for federal recognition, Jones explained. That increased demand for programmatic accreditors to be federally recognized then led to further questions about the accreditation agencies’ compliance with antitrust law and the Higher Education Act, which says that accreditors must operate independently from any related trade groups.

But recently the Trump administration has taken that scrutiny of the ABA to a new level. Jones acknowledged that while actions like the ABA’s opposition to signing statements and its support for DEI may have acted as “trigger points” for conservatives, their real concern is the monopolistic nature of the association and its accreditation arm.

Over the years, the ABA has made “some efforts to make it appear as though the council had become independent. But they were just for show,” Jones said.

In the meantime, she added, the ABA has continued to have strong influence over the accreditation council—the association’s push for the council to take on its DEI standards being a prime example. Now, Jones and other conservatives say things have reached a tipping point, and the Education Department is not only going after the ABA, but any accreditor that is not separate and independent.

“For 20 years we’ve been hearing the ABA accreditation council complain it’s going to go out of business if we hold it accountable, and for 20 years we’ve tried to allow them to assert their independence, and it hasn’t happened,” she said. “We no longer can just sit back and believe that adults can work these things out.”

Currier has said it’s time for the ABA’s accreditation arm to “read the tea leaves” and separate itself from the larger association. But he believes that its conflict with the GOP is largely political and stretches back as far as 1987, when Republican President Ronald Reagan nominated Robert Bork to sit on the Supreme Court. Bork was denied that seat in a 42-to-58 Senate vote, following a sharply divided review from the ABA’s judicial vetting committee and scathing remarks from two former ABA presidents. Critics have long alleged that it was the ABA’s review of the conservative candidate that cost him the seat.

From its founding in the 1870s until the mid-1900s, the ABA was a conservative group. But after the civil rights movement and particularly in the last decade, the association has leaned more to the left. Conservative critics blamed the group’s leftward shift for Bork’s denial nearly 40 years ago, Currier said, and since 2022, they’ve objected to the way those views influenced ABA’s stance on abortion, transgender rights and DEI initiatives.

Accusing the ABA’s accreditation council of a lack of independence from the larger association and violating antitrust law may be a less partisan attack strategy, he said, but the reasons for the attack remain largely partisan.

“We have to go back to the real argument, which is about issues around culture,” he said.

Robert Shireman, a Democratic-appointed member of the Education Department’s accreditation advisory committee, has publicly shared his worries that the accreditation arm is not fully complying with the requirement to remain separate and independent from the ABA. But with the “fuel” of culture war issues poured on top, he told Inside Higher Ed, “it’s hard for me to tell what anybody’s priority is in all of this.

“Is it really about trying to address issues in the market for preparing future lawyers? Or is it more about undermining what people think is a liberal organization?” Shireman asked. “I suspect the high-level conservative political folks are thinking, ‘Let’s use this hook of separate and independent, which even Bob Shireman will agree is a concern, and we’ll get enormous credit for doing battle with the ABA.’”

Neither the Department of Justice nor the Department of Education would comment on why they are going after the ABA’s accreditation arm. Paxton’s office also did not respond to Inside Higher Ed’s request for comment prior to publication.

Murky Endgame

It’s unclear what the GOP hopes to accomplish by targeting the ABA. But several conservative states, including Texas, Florida and Ohio, already have or are in the process of adjusting their eligibility criteria for state legal licenses so that graduating from an ABA council–approved institution is no longer a requirement to sit for the state bar.

Jones believes the GOP’s goal is to end “the ABA’s stranglehold over what students learn and who works at law schools.

“I don’t think that there’s an interest in shutting down the ABA,” she said. “The interest is in allowing law schools to become more ideologically diverse, creating a pathway for conservative lawyers to actually maybe get faculty positions, creating an opportunity for students in law school to hear both sides and not just the liberal point of view.”

But others aren’t sure how the Trump administration plans to accomplish that. At the last meeting of the accreditation advisory board, one Republican-nominated panel member, Jennifer Blum, noted that if the government strips the ABA of its federal recognition, it will no longer have a public forum to regularly question the accreditation council and push it to become separate. And the DOJ has yet to disclose how it will penalize the ABA if it is found to be violating antitrust law.

So while Currier believes the GOP wants to see diversity “redefined” and the accreditation council to become its own entity, he “has no earthly idea” how the Trump administration plans to achieve that beyond “sticking their thumb in the eye of the big ABA” and hoping it prompts the association to change.

To Shireman, the goal is not a resolution but a perpetual attack on the ABA as a left-leaning organization to “feed the conservative movement.”

“Having a fight, and maybe being able to claim they won the fight is a part of it,” he said. Being able to declare that the GOP took away the ABA’s federal recognition “becomes one of the bullets in the next campaign, a line in a speech.” Even if it isn’t that consequential in the world of academia, it helps the GOP rally its voters, he said.