Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton hasn’t been shy about taking on big entities breaking Texas law, be it Meta, ActBlue or MyChart. Now Paxton has taken aim at an association intertwined with the heart of America’s legal system, the American Bar Association.
Texas is investigating the American Bar Association’s alleged anti-competitive law school accreditation practices.
According to Attorney General Ken Paxton, the investigation will examine whether accreditation requirements set by the American Bar Association (ABA) “have unlawfully restricted competition or increased the cost of legal education, including through requirements affecting faculty compensation and law school operations.”
Paxton alleged that the American Bar Association has “weaponized” its “significant influence over legal education” across the nation to “artificially inflate faculty salaries, exclude law schools who challenged the ABA’s view of ‘elite’ legal education, and impose costly, burdensome accreditation requirements.”
Additionally, he alleged that the ABA uses its accreditation power to “impose unconstitutional racial and gender preference requirements on law schools’ admissions and hiring processes.”
Paxton also argued in his Wednesday announcement that this anticompetitiveness has levied significant costs on both existing and potential law schools, which deprives “the market of innovative, lower-cost approaches to legal education.”
“There must be competition and a fair playing field when it comes to law school accreditation, or else we risk inflated costs for students, unfair restrictions, and illegal discriminatory practices,” said Paxton. “My office will investigate whether the law school accreditation process has been used to unlawfully limit competition and burden students and institutions. No organization should be permitted to use its position of influence to violate our antitrust laws.”
Earlier this year, the Texas Supreme Court issued an opinion that eliminates the requirement for law students to attend an ABA accredited law school before taking the state bar exam, which Paxton noted will open new avenues for students to attain a legal education.
The court’s opinion highlighted that it intends to continue giving “approval to schools that satisfy a set of simple, objective, and ideologically neutral criteria using metrics no more onerous than those currently required by the ABA.”
For the majority of America’s history, lawyers didn’t need either American Bar Association imprimatur (or even a law degree) to practice law. Abraham Lincoln and Clarence Darrow never went to law school. Parallel to the New Deal, the ABA and the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) sought to cartelize the legal profession to restrict access and raise rates. Previously, self-study and apprenticeship was the path to a legal career.
Forcing law schools to implement quotas and cram social justice down student’s throats is a good reason to strip the ABA of its law school gatekeeper powers.