Save the Constitution. Ditch the ABA.

On Tuesday evening, at our Constitution Day event on campus, UATX announced an $11 million gift from Gail Jaquish and Steve Kenninger to build the university’s law program and endow the chair who will lead it. Judge James Ho of the Fifth Circuit delivered the address. The essay below, by UATX’s general counsel Adam Biggs, explains what we intend to build, and why this is the perfect time to do so. — The Editors

Today is Constitution Day. On this date 239 years ago, the Framers gave us all a republic governed by laws meant to secure individual freedom and hard-won liberty. Its future depends on forming new generations of legal minds prepared not merely to discuss the Constitution, but to keep it.

Keeping the Constitution demands lawyers who understand its original meaning, and fewer and fewer do. At the University of Austin (UATX), we built a tuition-free undergraduate program to form citizens and leaders who not only know our founding principles but will defend them. But the country needs a bigger, bolder version of that program, one that forms its future lawyers the same way. We will build it, and we cannot let anyone stand in the way, least of all the American Bar Association (ABA).

The ABA is a private trade association that has spent seventy years making sure no one builds a law school that doesn’t conform to its exact vision for legal education. Nearly every state treats graduation from an ABA-approved school as the only practical gateway into the profession. Through its accreditation standards, the ABA’s council micromanages how every law school in the country is organized, staffed, and financed. The model it enforces is expensive and outdated, and it stifles anyone who tries to build something different. Don’t conform, and your students can’t take the bar in most states.

This state-assisted monopoly hurts law schools, students, and America.

Its impact on tuition is most glaring. Adjusted for inflation, tuition at a public law school is more than five times what it was in 1985. At a private school, it has more than doubled. A student who graduated from a public law school this spring paid about $94,000 in tuition alone and about $166,000 in total cost of attendance for the degree.

We’ve long known that the ABA drives up tuition.

In 1995, the Clinton Justice Department sued the ABA for using accreditation to inflate professors’ salaries and impose requirements that had little to do with the quality of legal education. The result was ballooning costs for law schools and their students. The core of the case was that law professors and other insiders had captured the accreditation process and used it to serve their own economic interests. The ABA settled, then in 2006 admitted it had violated the settlement and paid $185,000.

The guild is still alive. The ABA’s standards still force every school to have a large full-time faculty of professors under an uncapped tenure system. They must teach nearly all the credit hours the school offers. But don’t make them teach too much, because, by rule, they must spend much of their time writing largely for other academics to read and performing “service” to the school, which can take little to no effort. This balloons overhead and prevents programs where sitting federal judges and practicing lawyers, who are real-world experts and far cheaper to employ, handle the majority of the curriculum. The status quo works well for insiders, but not for those who want a staffing model that lowers overhead and tuition.

Then there are the clinics, which act as small law firms inside the law school. The ABA’s standards make creating clinics largely unavoidable.

Students working real cases sounds good, in the abstract. Yet it is the most expensive way to teach anything. A professor teaching Property reaches hundreds of students. A clinical professor works with about eight. Despite that tiny reach, the ABA makes schools give clinical professors tenure-level job security and every perk of the full-time faculty, including offices, sabbatical eligibility, and research funding. Those permanent labor costs sit on top of the normal overhead of running a law firm.

Next come the library requirements. Every school must have a physical law library, though under the current standards it no longer must contain books. Requiring schools to keep a large room for legal research when everyone does their research online is hard to explain. Harder still, the ABA guarantees the library director who presides over the room, empty or not, a tenure-equivalent faculty appointment. And don’t think of asking the librarian to do another job. Running the library must be his principal responsibility. Schools must do all this even though an IT employee could cover most of the duties by managing electronic research subscriptions.

I could go on. But it is enough to understand that this regulatory scheme still ensures insiders have maximum leverage to benefit themselves, to the detriment of others, including students and, in the case of public schools, the taxpayer.

But how does this restrict the supply of top graduates able to dedicate their careers to maintaining our constitutional order?

Let’s start with student debt and its power to shape lives.

Six figures in student debt narrows a student’s options before their career begins. Someone called to serve ordinary Americans and work in public-interest law shouldn’t have to abandon that calling because only a large-firm salary can service the loans.

Those who suffer are the clients who can’t pay well: the small-business owner overwhelmed by a massive government agency, the speaker punished for sharing an unpopular view, the religious figure persecuted for prayer. Those cases need our best, and the ABA-enabled debt machine sends too many of them elsewhere. Each time one of these people can’t even try to defend their rights, our constitutional protections erode.

Money is not the only problem. The ABA also entrenches a single political ideology in law schools.

Its standards give faculty control over curriculum, hiring, and governance. When faculties pick their own colleagues, they pick people like themselves, and the drift compounds year after year.

Here’s the problem: the average law faculty is far to the left of the American public. Two in three Americans call themselves moderate or conservative.¹ On law faculties, fewer than one in five do.² In 1988, one in a hundred law professors was extremely liberal by the standard measure of political donations. By 2011, one in three was.³ The data end there, but anyone who has spent time on a campus since 2020 knows faculty hiring has only accelerated leftward. Notably, the same scholars found that students have shifted left even faster than their professors.⁴ It’s more proof that the ABA-enforced pipeline is producing what it was intended to.

The clinics also show what these faculties prioritize. As mentioned before, they are expensive to run, and unlike a seminar, a clinic files lawsuits and pushes policy to advance its mission. I reviewed 382 clinics at the 25 top-ranked law schools. Set aside the ones that are politically neutral on their face, such as First Amendment, traditional indigent defense, tax, veterans, and landlord-tenant work, and look at the clinics that appear to pick a political side. Nearly all of them pick the same one. Six arguably advance causes seen as right-leaning. More than 140 advance causes of the left.

Berkeley’s entire clinical program exists to “advance racial, economic, and social justice.”⁵ Yale’s Reproductive Rights and Justice Project has students represent abortion providers alongside national advocacy organizations.⁶ Michigan’s Civil Rights Litigation Initiative states its goal plainly: “to prepare students to use the law to advance social justice.”⁷ Cornell’s Movement Lawyering Clinic provides legal support for “women’s liberation, Black liberation, immigrants’ and LGBTQ rights, and more.”⁸ NYU’s Critical Race Lawyering Civil Rights Clinic has students practice law through a critical race theory lens.⁹ The list goes on.

Because the rules make clinics nearly impossible to avoid and clinicians nearly impossible to remove,¹⁰ these school-sponsored activists are here to stay.

Not surprisingly, these politics have made their way into the accreditation standards themselves.

The council required every school to teach “bias, cross-cultural competency, and racism.”¹¹ This requirement came from a letter signed by 150 deans amid the unrest of 2020, declaring racism “deeply embedded in our institutions, including in the legal profession,” and asking the ABA to mandate training in “anti-racist practices” as a condition of accreditation.¹² The council dropped the word “anti-racist.” It kept the underlying critical race theory premise.¹³ If those deans wanted “anti-racist” training in their own curricula, they could have added it themselves. Instead, they asked the ABA to force it on everyone else, and the ABA obliged.¹⁴

And until September 8 of this year, every school was also forced to embrace DEI by showing “concrete action” toward racial diversity in admissions and hiring. The ABA’s own interpretation said a state law forbidding racial preferences “is not a justification” for falling short of the ABA’s desired diversity targets.¹⁵

Race-conscious hiring has long been impermissible, and since June 2023, race-conscious admissions have been too. Knowing all this, the council kept grading schools against the rule and repealed it only to protect its monopoly after the Department of Education recommended stripping it of federal recognition. This isn’t about making better lawyers; it’s naked partisanship.

And in the end, the ABA has not changed its mind about whether forcing its politics on every school is the right thing to do. It has only agreed to let these requirements lie dormant for as long as the pressure lasts. They will be back.

The entrenchment of these pol