Dustin Houchin: Indiana has path for evaluating law schools without ABA

For 70 years, becoming a lawyer in nearly every American state has run through a single gatekeeper: the American Bar Association’s accreditation council.

That arrangement may not survive much longer. In August, U.S. Department of Education staff recommended stripping the ABA of its federal recognition as the accreditor of American law schools. With this in motion, Indiana should not wait for that process to finish before thinking through what comes next.

The Department of Education’s action follows an April 2025 executive order in which President Trump directed Education Secretary Linda McMahon to evaluate whether the ABA should keep its accreditor status. The findings released this August note that federal recognition rules require that an accrediting body operate separately from any organization with a stake in the outcomes it evaluates. The department’s report concludes that the ABA’s accreditation council fails that test. It is not, in the department’s words, “separate and independent” from the larger ABA, which is a professional advocacy organization that lobbies, litigates and takes institutional positions on contested political and legal questions. An organization that advocates on one side of contested legal and political questions should not simultaneously hold a monopoly on deciding which law schools are fit to operate, the department argues.

A final decision by the department is not guaranteed, and the ABA has said it intends to contest the findings when it appears before the advisory committee. Nonetheless, the state courts that regulate bar admission cannot afford to treat the outcome as settled either way. If the ABA loses federal recognition this fall, a law degree that was sufficient for licensure one day may not clearly qualify the next.

Indiana has, in fact, already built a small piece of the answer, even if it wasn’t designed with this scenario in mind. In February 2024, the Indiana Supreme Court amended Admission and Discipline Rule 13 to create a waiver pathway for graduates of certain non-ABA-accredited schools, prompted by Purdue Global Law School’s petition on behalf of its online J.D. graduates. Under that rule, the Board of Law Examiners may waive the ABA requirement where an applicant would otherwise be eligible to sit for the bar in another state, such as California, which already accredits Purdue Global directly. It’s a narrow, case-by-case mechanism, not a complete alternative accreditation system, but it demonstrates that Indiana’s own Board of Law Examiners is already capable of evaluating legal education quality without an ABA stamp as the sole input.

Indiana isn’t alone in confronting this, and the range of responses among states offers some lessons, although none is ready for prime time.

In January, the Texas Supreme Court removed the ABA as the final word on law school accreditation for bar admission purposes, replacing it with what the court described as “simple, objective, and ideologically neutral criteria.” Florida followed two weeks later, amending its rule so that “accredited” now includes any programmatic or institutional accreditor recognized by the U.S. Department of Education and separately approved by the Florida Supreme Court.

In addition to some states, other organizations have begun to take steps. One is the Commission for Public Higher Education, an organization formed by six Southern university systems and publicly framed by Florida’s governor as an effort to “break the ideological stronghold” of existing accreditors. This commission, however, is a general institutional accreditor built for entire universities, not a law-school-specific body, and it does not yet hold Department of Education recognition itself. The Association of American Law Schools has convened its own task force to study alternative accreditation models, additional pathways to the bar, and the broader landscape, but its first findings aren’t due until fall at the earliest.

As all of this continues to develop, the stakes are high. Bar admission portability across state lines has long depended on graduating from a nationally recognized law school. Prior experiments with non-ABA accreditation have a historically poor record. While there is a good argument to move away from the ABA, a rushed or botched transition to a different accreditation process risks trading one set of problems for another.

Yet, despite the risks, waiting passively is not a sound option either. Indiana’s own waiver-based approach under Rule 13.1 suggests a workable pathway to build the individualized evaluation capacity first and expand it as real alternatives to the ABA materialize. Whether or not the Department of Education ultimately strips the ABA’s recognition, Texas and Florida have already shown that the ABA’s role must no longer be treated as fixed. And Indiana’s courts have shown, in a narrower way, that they are willing to look past ABA accreditation when circumstances warrant it. The question for Indiana now is how far that same evaluative capacity could be extended deliberately toward ideologically neutral, quality education standards.•

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Houchin is the Washington County Superior Court judge in Salem. He also is the publisher of Judex, a Substack newsletter on conservative judicial issues at judex.substack.com. Opinions expressed are those of the author.