{"id":152390,"date":"2026-05-19T15:21:00","date_gmt":"2026-05-19T23:21:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/2026\/05\/19\/turns-out-the-abas-gatekeeping-role-actually-does-something\/"},"modified":"2026-05-19T15:21:00","modified_gmt":"2026-05-19T23:21:00","slug":"turns-out-the-abas-gatekeeping-role-actually-does-something","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/2026\/05\/19\/turns-out-the-abas-gatekeeping-role-actually-does-something\/","title":{"rendered":"Turns Out The ABA\u2019s Gatekeeping Role Actually Does Something"},"content":{"rendered":"

There is a new empirical study<\/a> that lands at a very awkward moment for a very loud political argument.<\/p>\n

The study, by Adam Chilton of the University of Chicago Law School and co-authors from Northwestern and Cleveland State, is titled \u201cAlternative Educational Pathways into the Legal Profession.\u201d It covers 35 years of data, from 1984 to 2019, on every attempt by every state to let people become lawyers without going through an ABA-approved law school \u2014 apprenticeships, law office study, correspondence programs, and non-ABA law schools. The findings are, to put it gently, not great for folks that want to kick the ABA to the curb.<\/p>\n

The Trump administration has spent the last year waging an aggressive culture-war campaign against the ABA\u2019s role as the gatekeeper of legal education, framing its accreditation monopoly as ideologically captured, anti-competitive, and ripe for dismantling. The FTC has filed letters with the Texas and Tennessee Supreme Courts urging them to ditch ABA accreditation requirements. FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson \u2014 speaking at a Federalist Society event, because of course<\/a> \u2014 called the ABA \u201ceffectively a branch of the Democratic Party\u201d and compared it to the Communist Party of America. Florida and Texas have already moved t<\/a>o eliminate their reliance on ABA accreditation for bar exam eligibility. Just last week<\/a>, the ABA \u2014 under sustained pressure \u2014 voted to repeal its diversity accreditation standard, Standard 206, in what one council member candidly described as a survival calculation rather than a change of heart.<\/p>\n

To be clear about what\u2019s actually going on here: the right\u2019s campaign against the ABA is not, at its core, about expanding access to legal education or lowering costs for aspiring lawyers. It is about punishing an institution they perceive as ideologically hostile. The ABA has sued to protect judicial independence, passed resolutions opposing Trump administration policies, and spent years pushing diversity standards in legal education. The response from the administration has been swift and coordinated: FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson banned FTC political appointees from holding ABA leadership positions or attending its events<\/a>; the DOJ issued a similar order shortly after, and former Attorney General Pam Bondi cut the ABA out of the federal judicial vetting process entirely<\/a>; and the Department of Labor banned its employees from attending ABA events on official time.The FTC\u2019s antitrust framing \u2014 that the ABA is a monopolist harming consumers \u2014 is the legal theory; the culture war is the actual motivation. Alternative pathways are not the goal. Stripping the ABA of its authority is the goal. Alternative legal training just happen to be the crowbar.<\/p>\n

Which makes this study particularly timely, because it examines what actually happens when states use that crowbar. And the answer is: not great.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s what the data shows. First, alternative pathways are not new or rare. At some point between 1984 and 2019, 40 states allowed at least one alternative pathway into the profession, and more than 106 non-ABA-approved law schools have operated during that period, roughly half the number of ABA schools. This is not some untested experiment. States have been trying this for decades.<\/p>\n

And yet\u2026 people who use alternative pathways fail the bar exam at catastrophically higher rates. Across states that allow these pathways, alternative-track candidates account for nearly 23 percent of failed bar exam attempts but only 4 percent of successful ones. The bar passage rate for non-ABA graduates hovers around 20 to 30 percent, compared to 60 to 70 percent for ABA graduates taking the same exam in the same state. In California, the biggest market for alternative pathways, ABA graduates pass at 58 percent while non-ABA graduates pass at 20 percent. The gap exists in every single state with meaningful alternative pathway usage, without exception, and it has not narrowed over time.<\/p>\n

For those who do make it through, the career outcomes are substantially worse. Non-ABA graduates are 57 percent less likely to work at a large firm than graduates of even the lowest-ranked ABA schools, essentially never make partner at a large firm, and are 52 percent less likely to obtain a license in a second state, meaning their practice is geographically trapped. They are also disciplined at twice the rate of low-ranked ABA graduates, which is a significant public protection concern.<\/p>\n

The authors put it plainly: neither the non-ABA schools nor the states regulating them have demonstrated any ability to self-regulate effectively. Every time states have expanded these pathways, the outcomes have been the same.<\/p>\n

This brings us, inevitably, to Kim Kardashian \u2014 the most famous living advertisement for the alternative pathway, and currently its most conspicuous cautionary tale. ATL has been following Kardashian\u2019s quest to become a lawyer without going to traditional law school since she first announced her apprenticeship in 2019<\/a>, and the journey has been, to put it charitably, instructive. She failed the baby bar three times<\/a> before finally passing on her fourth attempt in December 2021<\/a>. She completed her six-year apprenticeship in May 2025<\/a> and sat for the California Bar Exam in July 2025<\/a>. She did not pass \u2014 and as ATL noted at the time, she apparently consulted psychics who promised she would<\/a>, which did not help. She will not be sitting for the bar again until at least 2027.<\/a> <\/p>\n

In the meantime, she plays a lawyer on TV.<\/p>\n

None of this is a knock<\/a> on Kardashian, whose commitment to criminal justice reform has been genuine and consequential with or without a bar card. But she is, at this moment, a data point. A highly motivated, well-resourced, deeply committed person who spent six years on the alternative pathway and has not yet cleared the bar exam, which is precisely the outcome the study predicts at scale. If the alternative pathway is this hard for someone with unlimited resources and genuine dedication, what does that say about its promise as a mass solution to the access-to-justice crisis?<\/p>\n

The study\u2019s authors are careful to note that their data ends in 2019, before the recent wave of state-level reforms, and that some of the newer supervised practice pathways may function differently than the older models they examined. They also acknowledge that the access-to-justice rationale for expanding alternative pathways is real, even if the track record is mixed. These are fair caveats.<\/p>\n

But the broader lesson seems clear, and it is worth stating directly in the current political moment: the problem with legal education in America is not that the ABA exists. It is not that law schools require accreditation. The problems are real \u2014 costs are too high, the geographic distribution of lawyers is badly skewed, and too many communities lack access to affordable legal help. Those are genuine crises worth fixing. But they don\u2019t get fixed by dismantling quality controls because the organization enforcing them made the mistake of caring about diversity and judicial independence.<\/p>\n

Listen, the ABA\u2019s accreditation process has sometimes functioned as a barrier to entry rather than a guarantor of quality, it has been slow to adapt to online education and flexible scheduling, and the cost burden it effectively imposes on legal education is worth examining honestly. These are legitimate critiques, and they were being raised \u2014 by researchers, reformers, and legal educators \u2014 long before Andrew Ferguson started comparing the ABA to the Communist Party at FedSoc events.<\/p>\n

But the campaign against the ABA is not a good-faith effort to fix those problems. It is a political operation and the likely beneficiaries are not aspiring lawyers from underserved communities \u2014 it\u2019s states that want to run their own accreditation systems with their own ideological preferences baked in.<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, host of\u00a0The Jabot podcast<\/a>, and co-host of\u00a0Thinking Like A Lawyer<\/a>. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email\u00a0her<\/a>\u00a0with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter\u00a0@Kathryn1<\/a>\u00a0or Bluesky\u00a0@Kathryn1<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The post Turns Out The ABA\u2019s Gatekeeping Role Actually Does Something<\/a> appeared first on Above the Law<\/a>.<\/p>\n

<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

There is a new empirical study<\/a> that lands at a very awkward moment for a very loud political argument.<\/p>\n

The study, by Adam Chilton of the University of Chicago Law School and co-authors from Northwestern and Cleveland State, is titled \u201cAlternative Educational Pathways into the Legal Profession.\u201d It covers 35 years of data, from 1984 to 2019, on every attempt by every state to let people become lawyers without going through an ABA-approved law school \u2014 apprenticeships, law office study, correspondence programs, and non-ABA law schools. The findings are, to put it gently, not great for folks that want to kick the ABA to the curb.<\/p>\n

The Trump administration has spent the last year waging an aggressive culture-war campaign against the ABA\u2019s role as the gatekeeper of legal education, framing its accreditation monopoly as ideologically captured, anti-competitive, and ripe for dismantling. The FTC has filed letters with the Texas and Tennessee Supreme Courts urging them to ditch ABA accreditation requirements. FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson \u2014 speaking at a Federalist Society event, because of course<\/a> \u2014 called the ABA \u201ceffectively a branch of the Democratic Party\u201d and compared it to the Communist Party of America. Florida and Texas have already moved t<\/a>o eliminate their reliance on ABA accreditation for bar exam eligibility. Just last week<\/a>, the ABA \u2014 under sustained pressure \u2014 voted to repeal its diversity accreditation standard, Standard 206, in what one council member candidly described as a survival calculation rather than a change of heart.<\/p>\n

To be clear about what\u2019s actually going on here: the right\u2019s campaign against the ABA is not, at its core, about expanding access to legal education or lowering costs for aspiring lawyers. It is about punishing an institution they perceive as ideologically hostile. The ABA has sued to protect judicial independence, passed resolutions opposing Trump administration policies, and spent years pushing diversity standards in legal education. The response from the administration has been swift and coordinated: FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson banned FTC political appointees from holding ABA leadership positions or attending its events<\/a>; the DOJ issued a similar order shortly after, and former Attorney General Pam Bondi cut the ABA out of the federal judicial vetting process entirely<\/a>; and the Department of Labor banned its employees from attending ABA events on official time.The FTC\u2019s antitrust framing \u2014 that the ABA is a monopolist harming consumers \u2014 is the legal theory; the culture war is the actual motivation. Alternative pathways are not the goal. Stripping the ABA of its authority is the goal. Alternative legal training just happen to be the crowbar.<\/p>\n

Which makes this study particularly timely, because it examines what actually happens when states use that crowbar. And the answer is: not great.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s what the data shows. First, alternative pathways are not new or rare. At some point between 1984 and 2019, 40 states allowed at least one alternative pathway into the profession, and more than 106 non-ABA-approved law schools have operated during that period, roughly half the number of ABA schools. This is not some untested experiment. States have been trying this for decades.<\/p>\n

And yet\u2026 people who use alternative pathways fail the bar exam at catastrophically higher rates. Across states that allow these pathways, alternative-track candidates account for nearly 23 percent of failed bar exam attempts but only 4 percent of successful ones. The bar passage rate for non-ABA graduates hovers around 20 to 30 percent, compared to 60 to 70 percent for ABA graduates taking the same exam in the same state. In California, the biggest market for alternative pathways, ABA graduates pass at 58 percent while non-ABA graduates pass at 20 percent. The gap exists in every single state with meaningful alternative pathway usage, without exception, and it has not narrowed over time.<\/p>\n

For those who do make it through, the career outcomes are substantially worse. Non-ABA graduates are 57 percent less likely to work at a large firm than graduates of even the lowest-ranked ABA schools, essentially never make partner at a large firm, and are 52 percent less likely to obtain a license in a second state, meaning their practice is geographically trapped. They are also disciplined at twice the rate of low-ranked ABA graduates, which is a significant public protection concern.<\/p>\n

The authors put it plainly: neither the non-ABA schools nor the states regulating them have demonstrated any ability to self-regulate effectively. Every time states have expanded these pathways, the outcomes have been the same.<\/p>\n

This brings us, inevitably, to Kim Kardashian \u2014 the most famous living advertisement for the alternative pathway, and currently its most conspicuous cautionary tale. ATL has been following Kardashian\u2019s quest to become a lawyer without going to traditional law school since she first announced her apprenticeship in 2019<\/a>, and the journey has been, to put it charitably, instructive. She failed the baby bar three times<\/a> before finally passing on her fourth attempt in December 2021<\/a>. She completed her six-year apprenticeship in May 2025<\/a> and sat for the California Bar Exam in July 2025<\/a>. She did not pass \u2014 and as ATL noted at the time, she apparently consulted psychics who promised she would<\/a>, which did not help. She will not be sitting for the bar again until at least 2027.<\/a> <\/p>\n

In the meantime, she plays a lawyer on TV.<\/p>\n

None of this is a knock<\/a> on Kardashian, whose commitment to criminal justice reform has been genuine and consequential with or without a bar card. But she is, at this moment, a data point. A highly motivated, well-resourced, deeply committed person who spent six years on the alternative pathway and has not yet cleared the bar exam, which is precisely the outcome the study predicts at scale. If the alternative pathway is this hard for someone with unlimited resources and genuine dedication, what does that say about its promise as a mass solution to the access-to-justice crisis?<\/p>\n

The study\u2019s authors are careful to note that their data ends in 2019, before the recent wave of state-level reforms, and that some of the newer supervised practice pathways may function differently than the older models they examined. They also acknowledge that the access-to-justice rationale for expanding alternative pathways is real, even if the track record is mixed. These are fair caveats.<\/p>\n

But the broader lesson seems clear, and it is worth stating directly in the current political moment: the problem with legal education in America is not that the ABA exists. It is not that law schools require accreditation. The problems are real \u2014 costs are too high, the geographic distribution of lawyers is badly skewed, and too many communities lack access to affordable legal help. Those are genuine crises worth fixing. But they don\u2019t get fixed by dismantling quality controls because the organization enforcing them made the mistake of caring about diversity and judicial independence.<\/p>\n

Listen, the ABA\u2019s accreditation process has sometimes functioned as a barrier to entry rather than a guarantor of quality, it has been slow to adapt to online education and flexible scheduling, and the cost burden it effectively imposes on legal education is worth examining honestly. These are legitimate critiques, and they were being raised \u2014 by researchers, reformers, and legal educators \u2014 long before Andrew Ferguson started comparing the ABA to the Communist Party at FedSoc events.<\/p>\n

But the campaign against the ABA is not a good-faith effort to fix those problems. It is a political operation and the likely beneficiaries are not aspiring lawyers from underserved communities \u2014 it\u2019s states that want to run their own accreditation systems with their own ideological preferences baked in.<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, host of\u00a0The Jabot podcast<\/a>, and co-host of\u00a0Thinking Like A Lawyer<\/a>. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email\u00a0her<\/a>\u00a0with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter\u00a0@Kathryn1<\/a>\u00a0or Bluesky\u00a0@Kathryn1<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The post Turns Out The ABA\u2019s Gatekeeping Role Actually Does Something<\/a> appeared first on Above the Law<\/a>.<\/p>\n

<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There is a new empirical study that lands at a very awkward moment for a very loud political argument. The study, by Adam Chilton of the University of Chicago Law School and co-authors from Northwestern and Cleveland State, is titled \u201cAlternative Educational Pathways into the Legal Profession.\u201d It covers 35 years of data, from 1984 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":152391,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-152390","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-above_the_law"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/xira.com\/p\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/IMG_5243-1-scaled-e1623338814705-620x568-Bm2MCe.jpg?fit=620%2C568&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152390","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=152390"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152390\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/152391"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=152390"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=152390"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=152390"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}