The Council of the American Bar Association’s (ABA) Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar is the primary accreditor of law schools in the United States. ABA accreditation indicates that a law school meets certain requirements in curriculum, faculty, facilities, and student services, and, most importantly, that the school’s graduates are permitted to take the bar exam to obtain their license to practice law in most states. In February 2026, the Council invited public comment on its controversial proposal to repeal Standard 206. This modest but important standard requires accredited law schools to take “concrete steps to cultivate diverse and inclusive learning environments, promote equal opportunity, reduce discrimination, and prepare lawyers to competently serve all communities.”
Hundreds of law professors, legal practitioners, law students, and legal organizations, both individually and collectively, urged the ABA Council to resist capitulation to the Trump administration’s pressure campaign to eliminate diversity initiatives and race consciousness in legal education and the profession. Many argued that not only should the Council retain Standard 206, but it should strengthen it. The Critical Legal Collective (CLC), the organization we represent here, is among this group.
The CLC is a national group of legal scholars representing some of the many intellectual formations that advance critical legal theory.1 We seek to promote a more inclusive, democratic, and just legal academy and society through scholarship, teaching, and advocacy that reckons honestly and completely with past and present structural oppression. As a collective of workers, we build partnerships, projects, and power to advance critical knowledge and actions in education and beyond, in pursuit of the promise of multiracial democracy with equal justice for all.
Last month, the CLC submitted a detailed public comment opposing the repeal of Standard 206.2 The comment, excerpted in the following entry, is steeped in the critical history of the racist origins of the ABA and the legal profession, which fostered an elite white male preserve. Standard 206, in response, is a modest and still legally supported mechanism of repair. The full comment, to which a link is provided, additionally argues that Standard 206 also mandates an inclusionary framework in legal education that has a broad focus. Further, it facilitates ABA requirements of nondiscrimination, academic freedom and cultural competency instruction, the elimination of which undermines these other standards, to the detriment of legal education.
In this blog entry, we describe some of the arguments made by additional commenters in support of Standard 206. All but two of the dozens of comments submitted to the Council supported preserving Standard 206. Subsequent blog entries include signatory letters and selected comments and excerpts of longer comments that represent a variety of groups and individuals. These letters convey compelling legal arguments and personal narratives that demand the promotion of diversity and belonging initiatives in the legal academy, which remains the gateway to the tragically homogenous legal profession. We believe these comments present a forceful case that Standard 206 is more necessary than ever and should be retained despite the current backlash against diversity and inclusion measures in law and society.
The ABA Council will meet in Chicago on May 15, 2026 to decide the status of Standard 206. We expect it to meet this moment, its moment, and do what history, experience, and reason demand—preserve and fortify the ABA’s commitment to diversity and inclusion through Standard 206 .
Join us in this campaign and our other initiatives by becoming a CLC member here: https://criticallegalcollective.org/join/. We welcome you and those on the correct side of history to move us forward, not back.
1. Rule 206 Comment Arguments and Excerpts
The overwhelming support for Standard 206 was based on a variety of arguments. One common thread running through the comments was that the Trump administration’s assertion that Rule 206 is unlawful cannot withstand legal scrutiny. Many of the submitters noted that the Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which limited the consideration of race in university admissions decisions, did not prevent the ABA from requiring law schools to demonstrate commitment to the values of diversity or inclusion.
Other groups, such as the CLC and the Howard University’s Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights, pointed to recent court decisions finding that federal attempts to restrict diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives were unconstitutional. For example, the Department of Education’s “Dear Colleague Letter,” which advanced the same legal arguments it is using to threaten the Council, was judged to be unconstitutional in American Federation of Teachers v. Dept. of Education, 796 F. Supp. 3d 66 (2025).
Several commenters also noted that recent efforts by individual states to limit DEI initiatives in higher education should have no impact on whether Rule 206 remains standing. These comments cautioned against letting a handful of states dictate national policy and warned that such action would diminish the ABA’s role as a national accreditor. As the ABA Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Center stated, “Repealing Standard 206 would have the practical effect of allowing a small number of jurisdictions to dictate outcomes that undermine the Council’s broader mission. The Council’s accreditation standards are intended to provide national leadership and consistency. Yielding that role in response to resistance from a limited number of actors, based on a mischaracterization or overstatement of current law, risks weakening the Council’s impact and undermining its ‘commitment to support and promote the rule of law.”
The University of Washington Law School’s letter concretely demonstrated that “enacted and proposed laws in states are not a true barrier to applying and enforcing Standard 206” by citing its own history of advancing diversity and inclusion despite the Washington state ban on affirmative action in admissions decisions.
A second thread connecting much of the opposition was the recognition that Standard 206 is a necessary corrective to repair the harm caused by centuries of discrimination in the legal profession.
As Professor Maurice Dyson noted, the ABA’s history of restricting membership of the bar to white men “underscores the stakes. A decision now to retreat from Standard 206 would not be a neutral institutional adjustment; it would carry the grave and shameful appearance of returning, in spirit, to a past the ABA has rightly sought to overcome.”
Professor Gregory Magarian, who identified himself as a “straight, cisgender, white, gentile, physically abled man, said that he had “observed with sorrow and often anger the challenges that students who lack one or more of those privileges face in navigating law school and entering the profession . . . the overarching systems of legal education and legal practice are largely of, by, and for people like me. To require that law schools pay attention to, and make some efforts to ameliorate, identity-based disadvantages is a minimal intervention into a massive, consequential problem.”
Distinguished Professor Angela Harris told her personal story of “the headwinds of structural subordination” within legal academia as the first Black woman hired at Berkeley Law School from race and gender-based comments on student evaluations to belittling comments from colleagues to being the lowest-paid tenure track faculty member. She noted the broader effects such subordination has, and the impact law can have in correcting them: “Law is the code of markets. It is the language of political governance. It casts a shadow over our everyday lives as citizens, caregivers, workers, neighbors, consumers, and denizens of the natural world. For these reasons, law is too important to abandon to homogeneity. It is too important to abandon to complacency.”
The National Asian Pacific American Bar Association, which represents the interests of more than 80,000 Asian Pacific attorneys, judges, law professors, and attorneys across the nation as well as over 90 national, state, and local APS bar associations, noted that their attorneys “continue to face systemic barriers” which “inhibit advancement” and underline the need for a “structural framework in place so that the legal profession’s and the legal academy’s commitment to promote access, opportunity, and belonging are not merely horatory (and inconsistent) but achievable nationwide.”
A third strand of comments focused on the benefits of Rule 206 to the legal profession and democratic society: it enhances the rule of law, protects our democracy, and inspires trust in the legal profession. As Professor Margaret Montoya aptly noted, “Without a diverse bench and bar, the rule of law is weakened as the people see and come to distrust their exclusion from the mechanisms of justice.” And the Professional Staff Congress CUNY Law Union Chapter wrote, a “diverse legal profession ensures that the interpretation, application, and evolution of the law are informed by a full understanding of societal needs and realities. When individuals see themselves represented in the legal profession – from law school classrooms to courtrooms to legislative chambers – it fosters a sense of inclusivity and legitimacy in the legal system.”
Tomas Hernandez, a law professor and the 2026 Oregon State Bar President, the son of immigrants and a veteran of the war in Afghanistan, wrote that “Standard 206 exists because the profession has a documented and persistent diversity problem. Lawyers are among the least racially diverse of any major profession.” To illustrate that point, he noted that he had been “taught – implicitly and explicitly – that the legal profession was not built for people who looked like me or came from where I came from. I know what it costs when that message goes unchallenged. And I know what it means when institutions with the power to challenge it choose not to.”
Professor Sheldon Bernard Lyke and a dozen of his colleagues suggested that the Council go even further and focus on the racial bias in evaluation criteria in law schools and practice that underwrite the persistent racial discrimination in the profession and academy. Here the focus should be on the correcting inequality rather than on the amorphous diversity and inclusion rationale.
Finally, many commenters argued that capitulation to political pressure holds many dangers and will only incentivize further assaults on the ABA and the legal profession.
Two hundred and sixty six law professors wrote that “repealing this standard would enable and lend credence to the racist and misogynistic rhetoric and politics that anchor the Trump administration’s assault on our communities, our institutions, and our profession. Should [the ABA council] nonetheless choose to eliminate Standard 206, [the] decision will communicate that the ABA council lacks the integrity and courage necessary to serve as our nation’s leading regulator of legal education.” The Clinical Legal Education Association, the largest national organization of law professors, pointed out that repeal of Standard 206 in response to political pressures would signal that the core commitments of the profession can be relaxed or abandoned when politically inconvenient. “This undermines the rule of law, which depends on stability, principles, and resistance to arbitrary interference.”
Professor Alena Allen provided one of the most compelling perspectives on this point:
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 . . . 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.
- Critical legal theory is knowledge toward progress produced by successive generations of scholars, lawyers, and activists in law and other disciplines that comes from collective struggle of societal bottom groups and from self-critical reflection. See Francisco Valdes, Steven W. Bender, and Jennifer J. Hill, Critical Justice: Systemic Advocacy in Law and Society ch. 1 (2021) (discussing the values and evolution of the various critical schools of legal knowledge). ↑
- CLC, Letter on Standard 206, [on file]. ↑