The Threatened Federalization of Law-School Accreditation Is an Attack on the Legal Profession’s Independence

Lawyers beware: the federal government is seeking to use the Department of Education’s authority over higher-education accreditation to take control over legal education, and thus indirectly control over admission to the bar. And the government has made it clear that it intends to impose ideological requirements on legal education, which would undermine the legal profession’s independence. Lawyers and law schools should gird themselves for a fight over the government’s unconstitutional attempt to impose its ideology on legal education.

American lawyers have always been admitted to practice (i.e., licensed) by the states, not the federal government. States exercise their authority over law licensing through either the state courts (as in New York) or official, mandatory state bar associations (as in California). The American Bar Association’s Council of the Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar (Council) is the sole federally recognized accreditor for J.D. programs, and it is independent of the ABA, as required by law. All states recognize law schools accredited by the Council as meeting the legal-education requirements to qualify for the bar examination; forty-six states limit eligibility for bar admission to graduates of these accredited schools.

The federal government probably lacks constitutional power to directly dictate criteria for states’ licensing of lawyers, but it is now seeking to do so indirectly. The wedge is law schools’ accreditation and eligibility for federal student loans. Most law students rely on federal education loans as their primary source of financial aid, and students can get federal loans only if their school’s accreditation is recognized by the DOE. This gives the federal government a powerful weapon to dictate requirements for whatever agency accredits law schools, and hence for the law schools themselves.

In response to a prior demand by the Trump administration, the Council has suspended enforcement of its “diversity and inclusion” requirement for accredited law schools, while it considers revisions in light of the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision in the Harvard and UNC cases that prohibited race-based affirmative action in higher-education admissions.

But the administration was not satisfied. On April 23, 2025, President Trump issued an executive order on “Reforming Accreditation to Strengthen Higher Education,” which applies to all institutions of higher education, but specifically targets the Council and law schools. In particular, the order directs the DOE to “assess whether to suspend or terminate the Council’s status as an accrediting agency under Federal law.” The order’s general provisions should also be of great concern to lawyers, particularly the requirement that the DOE “ensure that . . . accreditation requires that institutions support and appropriately prioritize intellectual diversity amongst faculty in order to advance academic freedom, intellectual inquiry, and student learning.”

This provision in the accreditation order is substantially the same as the demand in the administration’s letter to Harvard, dated April 11, 2025, that “each department, field, or teaching unit must be individually viewpoint diverse.” Both provisions seek to implement right-wing activists’ longstanding desire to increase the number of right-wing professors in universities. And both are surely unconstitutional. As Alan M. Garber, President of Harvard University, wrote in response to the administration’s demands to Harvard, the government’s “assertions of power . . . to control teaching and learning at Harvard and to dictate how we operate” violate the right to free speech:

“The administration’s prescription goes beyond the power of the federal government. It violates Harvard’s First Amendment rights . . . . And it threatens our values as a private institution devoted to the pursuit, production, and dissemination of knowledge. No government—regardless of which party is in power—should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.”

The same free-speech concerns apply with special force to law schools. As Georgetown Law School Dean William M. Treanor wrote in response to the interim U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia’s demand that Georgetown Law cancel all “diversity, equity, and inclusion” programs, the government cannot properly dictate what law schools teach:

“The First Amendment . . . guarantees that the government cannot direct what Georgetown and its faculty teach and how to teach it. The Supreme Court has continually affirmed that among the freedoms central to a university’s First Amendment rights are its abilities to determine, on academic grounds, who may teach, what to teach, and how to teach it.”

For law schools (and medical and other professional schools, which are also targeted by the executive order on accreditation), what’s at stake is not only academic freedom but also professional independence.

This is going to be a long fight. The Trump administration’s cancellation of research grants for Harvard, Columbia, and other universities demonstrates its willingness to use federal funding to try to force universities to accept government control over their faculty hiring, student admissions, and curriculum. Law schools don’t depend on federal research grants, but they depend on their students’ access to federal loans, and they are not to be spared from the administration’s attempt to impose its ideology on higher education. It is ironic that an administration of the political party that until recently proclaimed its commitment to federalism, and still proclaims its devotion to free speech, is now seeking federal government control over legal education and the licensing of lawyers.