Does the ABA Do Good? (Part II)
The ABA has been the official federal accrediting body of law schools since 1952, a task it undertook informally after the issuance of the Root Committee Report in 1921. A law school approved by the ABA can remain in business because its students are eligible for federally guaranteed loans and because every state’s licensing authority has made graduates of ABA-approved law schools eligible to take its bar exam. Thus, a law school wants to please the ABA inspection teams that visit every seven years (and more often if the school is new) for a determination of whether to re-approve the school.
Has the existence of the ABA as accrediting body aided legal education? Before 1995, the answer was a qualified yes. The ABA demanded law schools invest in resources that aided students (for example, requiring more full-time faculty), and inculcated a professionalism in legal education that provided for enhanced (though flawed) training of lawyers. The system had its faults, particularly the ABA’s use of its monopoly approval power to 1) push for faculty pay increases, 2) make demands regarding size of libraries and secure tenure status for librarians, and 3) make excessive capital demands of new law schools. On the whole, though, as Robert Stevens concluded in an article on American legal education, the ABA deserved two cheers. See Robert Stevens, Two Cheers for 1870: The American Law School, in Law in American History 405 (Donald Fleming & Bernard Bailyn eds. 1971).
This ABA’s understanding of its role and its actions regarding it authority has changed markedly since the entry of the consent decree in the antitrust matter filed by the DOJ against the ABA.