On January 6, all nine Texas Supreme Court Justices signed an order removing the American Bar Association’s (ABA) power over admission to the Texas bar. In other words, law graduates looking to take the Texas bar exam no longer have to have graduated from a law school accredited by the ABA. Instead, the Texas Supreme Court has provided its own approved list of schools.
What does this mean for current and future students at Texas law schools? Let’s dive in!
💡 Quick Summary: What’s Happening with Texas and the ABA
- The Texas Supreme Court eliminated the ABA accreditation requirement for graduates to sit for the Texas bar exam.
- Texas law schools will now be approved directly by the Texas Supreme Court instead of relying on the American Bar Association (ABA).
- In the short term, nothing changes. Even the state’s approved list of Texas law schools is identical to the ABA-accredited list.
- Schools must still meet key standards, including a 75% bar passage rate within two years of graduation.
- The biggest potential impact may be for non-ABA-accredited law schools, which could seek approval under Texas’ new framework.
- Questions remain about long-term portability and whether degrees from Texas law schools will remain easily transferable across states.
What ABA Accreditation Is And Why It Matters
So, what even is ABA accreditation? Basically, states needed a way to make sure lawyers taking the state bar had graduated from a school good enough to make them competent to practice law in the state. As of last year, all states trusted the ABA to make that determination.
The ABA will only accredit schools that abide by their standards (requiring such things as a full-time dean, nondiscrimination in admissions, acceptable performance in learning outcomes, and a curriculum that includes professional responsibility, writing experience, and experiential courses) and pass the accreditation process. It’s an exhaustive process.
To illustrate, the 2025-26 Standards and Rules of Procedure document is 168 pages long, not including numerous guidance memos. However, it has the benefit of standardizing law school accreditation in America. A student from an ABA-accredited school in, for instance, New York, does not have to worry that their J.D. won’t allow them to practice in Texas. As a real-life example, the author of this blog went to school at ABA-accredited NYU Law before practicing as an attorney in Texas for over two years.
Further Reading
Texas Supreme Court’s Decision: What Changed And How
Texas’ reliance on ABA accreditation started in the 1980s, when it decided that an “acceptable school” for admission to the Texas Bar was a law school accredited by the ABA. This was a popular move in that decade, since law had become a national business, and ABA accreditation offered uniformity and made it easier for lawyers to practice in multiple states.
This remains true today. For instance, at Texas’ most prestigious law school, The University of Texas at Austin School of Law (U.S. News rank #14), 40 percent of students come from out of state, and 30 percent of graduates practice out of state.
The Texas Supreme Court’s order reverses course after more than 40 years, but at least in the short term, it’s not much of a change. The new list of approved Texas law schools is identical to the ABA’s list. Going forward, schools on that list only have to ensure compliance with the following standards to maintain approval, and the court stated its intention not to impose any additional requirements on schools to remain approved:
- ABA standards 316: 75% bar passage rate within 2 years of graduation
- 502(a)-(c): admitting only students with bachelor’s degrees or clear qualifications “demonstrat[ing] an aptitude for the study of law”
- 503:requiring a “valid and reliable” admission test
- 509: publicly disclosing various admissions, tuition, outcomes, bar passage etc. data
Why Did Texas Drop ABA Accreditation
The court didn’t give any reason for the change, but there are some breadcrumbs to follow. All nine Justices of the court are Republican, and the ABA has come under fire from the Trump administration, which stripped the ABA of millions of dollars in federal funding and threatened to end the ABA’s national accreditation authority due to its “unlawful” diversity and inclusion standard. The standard requires schools to demonstrate “a commitment to diversity and inclusion by providing full opportunities for the study of law and entry into the profession by members of underrepresented groups,” including a diverse student body and faculty and staff. In response, the ABA has temporarily suspended its diversity and inclusion standard.
The Federal Trade Commission endorsed the Texas Supreme Court’s order at the proposal stage, arguing that the ABA “is dominated by practicing attorneys who have a strong interest in limiting competition for legal services,” and that “[t]he proposed change is an important step in weakening the ABA’s enduring monopoly and resulting power to impose costly, overly burdensome law school accreditation requirements.” This comes after FTC Chair Andrew Fergeson released a policy in February 2025 that “prohibits FTC political appointees from holding leadership roles in the American Bar Association (ABA), participating in ABA events, or renewing their ABA memberships.”
But, there may also be non-partisan reasons for the change. According to critics, ABA accreditation has become increasingly expensive and difficult, which pushes up law school costs and limits the ability of poorer, underserved areas like Texas’ Rio Grande Valley to get competent legal representation.
Lael Weinberger, law professor at George Mason University, wrote in the Washington Post: “[ABA accreditation] has been justified as a quality-control mechanism, but it also has the function of a cartel, setting costly and rigid requirements to restrict entry into the legal profession. In other words, the ABA has been able to engage in professional protectionism but with a virtuous front. The result has been a legal education system that is expensive to enter and slow to innovate, and, in turn, has not served ordinary Americans well.”
Similarly, Notre Dame Law School Professor Derek T. Muller writes that the ABA “regularly implements costly new regulations without adequately assessing their costs or benefits, and rarely examines their effectiveness in a public way,” and points to “the [ABA] Council’s insistence on pressing forward with its costly initiatives that have drawn nonpartisan opposition” as a factor driving the Texas Supreme Court’s decision.
Implications for Current and Future Texas Law Students
What are the implications for current students either studying at a Texas law school or looking to practice in Texas after graduation? Practically nothing, really. If your law school was accredited by the ABA, it remains an acceptable school to qualify for the Texas Bar; if it wasn’t, it still isn’t.
Even the ABA itself reacted by saying that the Supreme Court’s order “reinforces the authority that the Supreme Court of Texas has always had over the licensure of J.D. graduates” and that the ABA would continue working with states to let graduates practice across state lines.
For future applicants, the results are less clear. Deans from eight of 10 ABA-accredited Texas law schools argued the change could hurt lawyer mobility and increase costs. However, advocates argue that states already have idiosyncratic bar requirements, character-and-fitness rules, and continuing-education mandates, and that states can cooperate in making reciprocal rules to allow degrees to transfer out of state. The order itself states the intention to “preserve the portability of Texas law-school degrees into other states and to preserve the portability of out-of-state law-school degrees into Texas.” The question is whether the Texas Supreme Court will actually find a way to do that.
Will Non-Accredited Texas Law Schools Be Affected?
ABA-accredited law schools may not face much change due to the order, at least in the short term. They remain acceptable law schools, and merely have to follow certain ABA Standards that they had to follow anyway to continue that status. These schools are very unlikely to drop ABA accreditation soon.
Austen L. Parrish, president of the Association of American Law Schools, points out: “For example, a school like the University of Texas—where about 40 percent of students come from out of state and some 30 percent of graduates are placed out of state—cannot afford to not be ABA accredited. And I suspect that’s true for all of the ABA-accredited schools.”
The real change may be for non-ABA-accredited schools, which now have a chance to become acceptable schools under Texas’ new framework. California also allows people who didn’t graduate from an ABA-accredited school to take the bar, including California-accredited law schools, unaccredited schools, and apprenticeships. Kim Kardashian famously took the apprenticeship path, and perhaps even more famously, failed the California Bar.
Unfortunately, Kim K isn’t alone in failing the bar as a non-ABA-accredited graduate. Unaccredited institutions are less expensive than accredited ones, but also tend to have poorer outcomes and higher bar failure rates. This means that ABA-accreditation is still very valuable, and that prospective students will likely still want to put together the most compelling admissions pitch they can to get into the best schools they can, including having a high LSAT score.
Texas has become the first state to abandon the ABA as an accreditation agency, but not the last. Florida followed the next week and dropped its own requirement that lawyers hold a degree from an ABA-accredited school. Ohio and Tennessee have also started reviews of their state ABA requirements.
Final Thoughts
In all, the short-term change for law school applicants from a rules perspective is fairly minor. No schools have been added or removed from Texas’ list of acceptable law schools, and the Supreme Court has indicated it doesn’t plan to drop any schools even in the long term. Students are still best served to try to get into highly ranked, accredited law schools with high bar passage and employment rates. The LSAT, of course, remains the biggest component of admissions decisions.
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