A top Trump Justice Department official is threatening the nation’s biggest lawyers’ group over a rule he says crimps his side job.
Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward, the DOJ’s third-ranking official, warned the American Bar Association in an October 7 letter that it could face an antitrust investigation if it doesn’t loosen limits on part-time law professors, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday.
Woodward, who has been an adjunct law professor at Catholic University, according to his department bio, wrote that the rule appears to restrict his own ability to teach first-year students.
The letter, addressed to the ABA’s accreditation council, argued that adjuncts are cheaper and frequently bring more hands-on experience, and that capping their classroom time weakens legal education while pushing tuition higher.
The limits “cannot be clearly explained by differences in real or perceived quality” between full-time and adjunct instructors, Woodward wrote.
The standard at issue requires that full-time faculty teach “substantially all” of the first third of every student’s coursework.
Woodward gave the association 15 days to either change the rule or explain why it doesn’t run afoul of antitrust law. If the ABA’s answer falls short, he warned, the department “may proceed with additional investigatory steps.”
A spokeswoman for the accreditation council told The Journal the group intends to respond.
The ABA had already moved last month to drop the first-third requirement, though its proposal would still have full-time faculty teach more than half of a school’s credit hours or two-thirds of its student contact hours, per The Journal. Woodward’s letter signaled that wouldn’t be enough.
The threat is the latest salvo in the Trump administration’s fight with the bar association, which Republicans accuse of tilting left and wielding too much control over professional and educational standards, The Journal noted. Woodward’s letter faulted the ABA’s stances on abortion rights, affirmative action and transgender health care, arguing the group is out of step on modern legal debates.
The ABA sued the Trump administration last year over its moves against several elite law firms.
Separately, the Education Department has taken steps toward stripping the ABA council of its federally recognized role as a law school accreditor, a status schools need to tap federal student loans, per The Journal. Many states require a degree from an ABA-accredited school to sit for the bar, though Texas scrapped that rule earlier this year, The Journal added.
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