By Noreen Marcus, FloridaBulldog.org
The Florida Supreme Court has escalated the state’s war on the allegedly way-too-woke American Bar Association by inviting other law school accreditors to operate alongside the ABA.
The justices may oversee the venture themselves, urged on by Attorney General James Uthmeier: “By accrediting law schools directly, this Court can ensure that the ABA’s pernicious influence no longer infects Florida’s law schools, law students, and practitioners,” he wrote when the court took up the issue.
Gov. Ron DeSantis, who blasts the ABA for “left of the left” partisanship, had told his handpicked court to get cracking.
The stakes are enormous. The supreme court’s decision to end the ABA’s 34-year run as the only accreditor for Florida law schools will impact who attends them, what is taught, where Florida-trained lawyers get to practice, and how much professionalism legal-service consumers can expect.
The court’s ruling, effective Oct. 1, came down 5-1 with Justice Jorge Labarga dissenting. (Justice Adam Tanenbaum didn’t participate because he joined the court on Jan. 15, the day the ruling was published.)
“Crucial to Florida … the ABA has cultivated unmatched proficiency in dealing with Florida law school-specific issues that would require decades for any successor to develop,” Labarga wrote.
“Because I strongly believe that the best course for our legal educational system, our legal system, our profession, and above all, for Floridians is to stay the course with the ABA as the sole law school accreditor, I strongly dissent to the course taken by the majority today,” he wrote.
Here’s the current procedure: The ABA Accreditation Council evaluates dozens of criteria, from academics to economics, faculty, management and graduate job placement. Then the council either grants accreditation — often with conditions attached — or withholds, suspends or drops it. Regaining a lost accreditation is possible but extremely difficult.
For many students, the ABA law school endorsement unlocks crucial loans; grade ABA-certified schools command the highest tuition and attract the deepest applicant pools. Most importantly, graduates of ABA-approved schools can take the Florida Bar exam to obtain their licenses to practice law.
When Florida-licensed attorneys want to practice elsewhere, an ABA imprimatur helps them relocate. License “portability” can be their ticket home to the state they left to attend law school in Florida.
Even a Supreme Court workgroup that researched ABA work-arounds noted the appeal of licenses with legs — and of quality control.
“Law degree portability across states is a major benefit of ABA accreditation,” the group’s final report says. “Proponents credit its standards with establishing a baseline for a quality legal education.”
One of those proponents is Sudha Setty, president of the Law School Admission Council, a nonprofit representing more than 200 law schools in the U.S., Canada and Australia. She said ABA standards act as a critical shield for consumers, while a unified system lowers administrative costs across state boundaries.
Still, politics probably made Florida’s attack on the ABA, whose paid membership tops 150,000, inevitable. The Supreme Court and the national lawyers’ group have clashed over its longstanding commitment to diversity – for example, the court eliminated what it deemed illegal “diversity quotas” in continuing legal education.
Because in Florida, government policy treats “diversity” like a dirty word. And the only kind of “discrimination” that’s recognized seems to be bias against white males.
CRAFTING ANOTHER ACCREDITOR
One critic of the ABA’s approach to accreditation is Jeffrey Swartz, emeritus professor at the ABA-accredited Cooley Law School in Tampa. He said reviewers don’t always apply standards objectively and the ABA dislikes independents such as Cooley that aren’t affiliated with universities.
“So on that side of it, no love lost,” Swartz said. But that doesn’t mean he’s a fan of where the Supreme Court seems to be heading, either.
If the ABA’s Florida accreditation machine is sidelined, it must be replaced with something else, Swartz said. The options are outsourcing to another evaluator or creating a whole new in-house bureaucracy.
And yet now, nine months after the Supreme Court’s ABA decision, there’s no alternative in sight.
“They seem to be putting the cart before the horse,” Swartz said. “Before they move forward they need answers to questions that nobody’s asking.”
“My recommendation would be, let’s not move too fast,” Swartz said. “The Supreme Court should put together a bipartisan group with legislators and educators and prominent lawyers to sit down and figure out, what do we do? How do we do the best thing to benefit the schools and the students? It’s not something you can just do overnight, which is why they didn’t do it.”
Unlike Uthmeier, the justices haven’t been openly hostile to the ABA. “The Court’s goal is to promote access to high-quality, affordable legal education in law schools that are committed to the free exchange of ideas and to the principle of nondiscrimination,” their Jan. 15 majority opinion says.
In October 2025 the court directed a workgroup headed by former justice Ricky Polston to broaden a Bar admissibility rule that relied solely on ABA accreditation. The group identified a dozen possible substitutes and the court rewrote the rule accordingly.
UTHMEIER: ABA IS ‘UNWORTHY’
The court didn’t choose a favorite but leaned heavily on the idea of using one of the accrediting agencies preferred by the U.S. Department of Education. None of those agencies has specific standards for law schools, according to the court’s ABA ruling.
The justices wrote they could fill in the blanks for “curriculum, disclosures to prospective students, Bar passage rates, employment outcomes, compliance with federal and state law, protections for academic freedom, or other requirements the Court determines appropriate,” the ruling says.
That sounds like the court intends to use the accreditation process to put its own stamp on legal education. And Uthmeier provided the justification.
“The ABA is unworthy of the power it has been given over law school accreditation: it routinely forces law schools to engage in illegal racial discrimination; takes leftist positions in litigation; advocates and lobbies for leftwing public policy positions; and stifles competition and diminishes the quality of legal education,” he wrote to the court.
“He’s trying to pick a fight. It’s another attack on the legal system,” Swartz said.
“What Uthmeier doesn’t like is that law schools tend to teach the law the way it is, not the Heritage Foundation thought process of textualism and saying that the Constitution isn’t a living, breathing document,” Swartz said. Textualism interprets laws narrowly by looking only at their literal meaning and viewing them as if they were frozen in time when they were adopted.
“The idea is, they don’t want students to think but to obey,” Swartz said, referring to Uthmeier and his allies.
The attorney general, who’s in the final weeks of his first election campaign, is shaping legal education in his own small but lucrative way. An adjunct law professor at the University of Florida, he’s teaching about two hours a week for a salary of $100,000, the Miami Herald and Tampa Bay Times reported.
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