Preliminary Statement of Interest
I submit this comment in my individual capacity as a legal educator, and I do so on grounds that are, at their foundation, pedagogical. My interest in Standard 206(a) is not primarily political. It is curricular. Standard 206(a) bears directly on the conditions under which legal education is delivered, on who enters the classroom, on what experiences and communities are represented in the formation of lawyers, and on whether the profession we are training students to enter will be capable of serving the public that the rule of law is supposed to protect. These are questions that fall squarely within the domain of scholarly inquiry and academic judgment, and it is in that capacity that I write.
I note also that the independence of faculty to comment on accreditation standards that shape the conditions of legal education is itself a dimension of academic freedom. The pressure being applied to the ABA is pressure being applied, derivatively, to every law school and every legal educator in this country. The freedom to resist that pressure, and to say so in writing, is not incidental to the scholarly enterprise. It is part of it.
Comment
What This Is Actually About
The pressure to repeal Standard 206 did not come from lawyers. It did not come from law schools. It did not come from clients. It came from the executive branch of the federal government, delivered in the form of letters that are somewhat polite in their language and quite direct in their meaning. Comply, or face consequences.
The government has a long history of applying pressure to private bodies to make them conform to its preferences, and the record of that history is not uniformly admirable. What is different here, and worth noting, is that the repeal is being demanded in the name of equality, using the architecture of antidiscrimination law to dismantle a standard designed, in part, to address the fact that certain communities have never had reliable access to the profession that is supposed to speak the law’s language on their behalf.
This is not the first time the tools of liberation have been turned to serve other ends. It will not be the last.
The Text and the Fiction
Attorney General Bondi's February 28, 2025 letter to the ABA asks us to accept three things that are not true:
(1) that Standard 206 injects race into individual decisions; (2) that Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, 600 U.S. 181 (2023), swept away every institutional commitment to inclusion that a century of exclusion made necessary; and (3) that the federal government may simply revoke an accrediting body's standing until that body learns to agree. None of it holds. But the legal errors, significant as they are, are not the most important thing to say about this letter. The most important thing is this: the civil rights laws of the United States were written in blood, forged in protest, and achieved through long decades of organized refusal to accept a legal profession that looked nothing like the country it claimed to serve. Attorney General Bondi has taken those laws and turned them against the people they were written to protect. She is not seeking to vindicate the excluded. She is seeking to make their exclusion permanent.
And the excluded, here, are not only those whom the Attorney General's framing implies. They are the first generation student from a family that has never retained a lawyer, who arrives at law school without the social capital that her classmates have been accumulating since prep school. They are the student from McPherson County, Nebraska, or Tensas Parish, Louisiana, who came to law school because they know what it means to live sixty miles from the nearest attorney, and they intend to do something about it. They are the veteran, the working parent, the person who got there by a route the institution did not design for her and will not always accommodate. Standard 206 is not a racial preference program. It is a signal, to law schools, to administrators defending budgets, to faculty committees designing curricula, that the profession has acknowledged the distance between what it is and what the country and democracy need it to be. When you remove the signal, the acknowledgment disappears with it. The pipeline programs close. The rural recruitment initiatives lose their justification. The first-generation support structures that do not move the rankings and do not attract the donors fold quietly, and the profession contracts back toward the narrow demographic it has always found most comfortable.
The Profession’s Absence
Forty percent of American counties have fewer than one lawyer per thousand residents. That figure comes not from a blog or a law review article. It comes from the American Bar Association’s own census of the profession, conducted in 2020. The bar has counted its own absence and is now being asked to make it permanent.
This statistic means that in the counties and parishes where a particular kind of American life has been lived, often for generations, the law is a distant thing. Not distant in the sense of being unfamiliar, because the law has made itself felt in these places in many ways, through foreclosure, through debt collection, through the criminal system, through the slow administrative erosion of land that families have held for a century. Distant in the sense of being unavailable as a resource, as a protection, as the thing it is always described as being in the civics textbooks: a guarantor of rights, a check on power, an equalizer. Rights that cannot be exercised are not rights.
The problem of geography is compounded by the problem of representation. The legal profession is, by its own accounting, not representative of the country it serves. Lawyers of color make up twenty-three percent of the profession as of 2024, according to the ABA's own national survey, in a country where people of color constitute roughly forty-two percent of the population. Across all state high courts, just twenty-one percent of justices are Black, Latino, Asian American, or Native American, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. This matters beyond the symbolic. A courtroom is not a neutral space. It is a room in which power is exercised, rights are determined, and futures are decided. Who sits in that room, who argues in that room, who presides over that room, is not a question of optics. It is a question of legitimacy. A system that looks nothing like the people it governs, that has drawn its membership from the same narrow demographic for most of its history, has a standing problem that no amount of procedural formality can paper over. Standard 206(a) is the profession's acknowledgment of that problem. Repealing it does not make the problem disappear. It makes the profession complicit.
The Pipeline and the Price of Cutting It
Institutional behavior is driven by accreditation, because accreditation is survival. The pipeline programs generated by Standard 206(a) are often resource-intensive, and they are sustained largely because they demonstrate compliance with this standard. If you remove the requirement, you remove the budgetary justification, and the programs will inevitably begin to disappear.
Consider what we are actually talking about. The University of Nebraska College of Law runs a Rural Law Opportunities Program specifically designed to recruit students from the counties that the profession has abandoned, on the theory, supported by evidence, that the people most likely to serve those places are the ones who come from them. The program’s own website is candid about what abandonment looks like in practice: twelve of Nebraska’s ninety-three counties, among them McPherson, Arthur, Blaine, and Hayes, have no attorneys at all. Not too few. None. Programs like this one require resources to run. They do not move a school up the US News rankings. They exist, in part, because accreditation requires a demonstration of a law school’s commitment to full opportunities for the study of law, and that requirement gives administrators something to point to when the budget gets tight. When the signal disappears, the pointing stops. The people who built these programs will face budget meetings in which nothing on their ledger justifies itself by any metric the market recognizes, and the programs will end, and the twelve counties will still have no lawyers, and the number will grow.
We know from medicine that where a doctor grew up is the strongest predictor of where a doctor will practice. There is no reason to believe lawyers are different. The lawyer who grew up in Tensas Parish knows where Tensas Parish is. She knows the roads and the culture and the particular weight of the problems that accumulate there. If you want legal representation in Tensas Parish, your most reliable instrument is a woman who comes from it. The pipeline programs are how you find her. Standard 206(a) is how such pipeline programs survive.
On Independence
The bar has maintained, throughout its history, a certain distance from the state. I want to be precise about what I mean by distance, because the word can sound abstract, and nothing I am saying here is abstract.
I mean that when the government comes for you, when it sends its agents and its letters and its veiled suggestions about what might happen to your standing if you fail to cooperate, there is supposed to be someone who will say “no.” Who has the training to say it, the standing to say it, and enough separation from the machinery of state power to say it without immediately being consumed by what they have said “no” to? The legal profession has historically been that someone. Admittedly, neither perfectly nor consistently and not without its own long record of accommodation and failure.
I ask that you please think carefully about what it means when an institution comprised of lawyers complies with such a request. Not because it was persuaded or because the arguments were examined and found compelling after honest deliberation, but because letters arrived, letters with consequences attached to them, and the institution calculated what resistance would cost and decided the cost was too high. I want you to sit with that sequence for a moment, because it is not a hypothetical. It is what is being proposed here, dressed in the language of legal compliance and practicality.
If the ABA folds under this pressure, it does not simply repeal a standard. It publishes a price. Every law firm, law school, and law student watching, and they are all watching, now knows that the independence of the bar is a negotiating position, not a principle. That the negotiation, when it came, did not take long. And, here is what frightens me about that signal. The next administration will have noted it. The one after that will have noted it. Every actor who has an interest in shaping what the legal profession does, whom it serves, what it costs, how it is trained, who gets to enter it, will have noted it and filed it away. The ABA did not fight. The ABA calculated. The ABA moved based on self-interest.
This is not, in the end, a debate about one accreditation standard. The law is the language of power in America. If you cannot speak it, or pay someone to speak it for you, power moves over you without much friction. The profession that controls access to that language, that trains the people who speak it, that sets the terms under which one is admitted to it, holds something that is not simply a guild credential. It holds a kind of key. And the institution that accredits the training of those keyholders has, in this moment, been asked to hand that key over to the executive branch for adjustment. Think about who gets hurt when the key is adjusted.
Conclusion
I am not naive about institutions. I know they protect themselves first. I know that their stated values and their actual behavior under pressure are rarely the same. But there is a difference between ordinary institutional hypocrisy, which is survivable, and a moment in which an institution tells you, through its actions, exactly what it is worth and exactly who it will sacrifice to preserve itself. The first is a failing. The second is a confession.
Read Standard 206(a) for what it actually says. It does not demand outcomes. It does not guarantee seats. It asks only that a law school "demonstrate by concrete action 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, particularly racial and ethnic minorities…" Full opportunities. That is the standard. Not equity of result. Not preferential treatment. If “full opportunities” is too much, if that is the line the ABA will not hold, then the question is not whether 206(a) is worth fighting for. The question is what, in this institution, ever was. Lawyers argue for people's lives, their liberty, their children, their homes. If the body that accredits the schools that train those lawyers cannot commit to full opportunities as its floor, it has not simply repealed a standard. It has told us that the open door was never a promise. Instead, it was a privilege, extended conditionally, and conditions have changed.
Respectfully submitted,
Alena M. Allen
Professor of Law
Paul M. Hebert Law Center, Louisiana State University