Derek Muller (Notre Dame; Google Scholar), Could the National Center for State Courts Supplant the American Bar Association for Law School Accreditation?:

There is a recent report from the Conference of Chief Justices and the Conference of State Court Administrators on the Committee on Legal Education and Admissions Reform (CLEAR). Without being too negative about it, you can look at the 205-page report here, a project that comes out of the National Center for State Courts (NCSC). It has a lot of things, a lot of capture from particular constituencies (e.g., those looking for particular kinds of alternative licensure to the bar), and a lot of carefully wordsmithed language.

You can view the shorter, 24-page summary here, which touches on 9 “recommendations,” with sub recommendations, and, again, a lot of capture and wordsmithing.

Let me focus on Recommendation 3 of that report.

State courts recognize that law school accreditation should promote innovation and be cost-effective
Encourage law school accreditation that serves the public. State supreme courts should encourage an accreditation process that promotes innovation, experimentation, and cost-effective legal education geared toward lawyers meeting the legal needs of the public. …

An alternative accreditor for purposes of admission to the bar
Scholars like Professor Brian Leiter have noted that if the ABA continues its quest to micromanage law schools, “it really will be time to seek alternative accreditation agencies for law schools, ones that respect both law students and the academic freedom of law faculties to plan different courses of study.” Even setting aside the experiential proposal, recent amendments from the ABA, as I have chronicled, continue a quest to make law school accreditation more tedious and more expensive.

There is a sense, then, in which some alternative to the ABA would need to rise to be an accreditor for the bar. (Set aside the separate issue of accreditor for the Department of Education and the ability of institutions to secure access to student loans.) …

How an organization like NCSC could supplant the ABA
A change from ABA-accredited schools to NCSC-accredited schools could not happen overnight, or even terribly easily. But consider a few relatively straightforward steps. …

For critics of the ABA’s current position as accreditor—and I count myself among them—one can, rightly, seek to reform the ABA from within. Lengthy comments submitted during notice and comment for changes to the standards are one such way. But critics should also seriously consider alternative accreditors, and not just in the abstract, but in ways that they could tangibly become a reality.

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