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.
But the group suspended the standard in February 2025, shortly after the Trump administration began an aggressive effort to stamp out diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives at colleges and in American life.
On Tuesday, the association’s accreditation council struck down the standard on a 10-6 vote, effective immediately.
The move reflects the Trump administration’s attempt to use the accreditation system in its effort to force higher education to adopt its preferred policies.
President Trump signed an executive order in 2025 targeting higher education accreditation agencies. He singled out the A.B.A.’s diversity requirement, saying it had violated the 2023 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that struck down race-conscious admissions. Accreditors, he said, “abused their enormous authority.”
In recent months, the Department of Education has sent letters to other accrediting agencies, including ones that oversee medical schools, telling them to eliminate diversity requirements to remain recognized by the federal government.
An A.B.A. committee in May said that it was recommending eliminating the diversity requirement because the Education Department would view it as a violation of federal law. The committee also said it had received feedback from state supreme courts that the mandate was “a non-neutral standard that is outside the accreditor’s role.”
“The council believes that national accreditation of law schools is in the best interests of law students, the legal profession and the public, and we can best serve in this role with continued recognition by state supreme courts and the Department of Education,” Melissa Hart, chair of the association’s accreditation council, said in a statement Tuesday.
Opponents of the council’s decision said that the standard was necessary to fix the legal profession’s history of exclusion and that the change was not required to comply with the Supreme Court ruling or any other federal law.
“President Trump has successfully bullied the legal profession in profound ways since returning to the Oval Office,” said Justin Driver, a Yale law professor, in an email. “The venerable law firms that capitulated to his bullying tactics did not exactly cover themselves in glory. I fervently wish that the A.B.A. had stood up for its beliefs in this critical moment for the rule of law.”
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