The rise and fall of the American Bar Association

[White Wolf]

The rise and fall of the American Bar Association
by Jonathan Turley, opinion contributor - 12/06/25 10:30 AM ET

This week, the Federal Trade Commission issued a little-noticed letter to the Texas Supreme Court that could have a significant impact on the legal profession. The state justices are exploring a radical change in bar admissions, seeking alternatives to the American Bar Association.

In their letter, FTC officials indicated that they view the ABA as an effective monopoly in bar admissions. The potential state change itself may be less important than how the ABA itself has changed in bringing about these growing calls for separation from the roughly 150-year-old organization.

In the fall, the Texas Supreme Court issued a tentative opinion that declared that the ABA “should no longer have the final say on whether a law school’s graduates are eligible to sit for the Texas bar exam and become licensed to practice law.”

After the court invited public comment, two FTC officials, Clarke Edwards and Daniel Guarnera, signaled support for potentially moving away from ABA accreditation in a nine-page letter. They not only objected to the possible monopoly but also to the “rigid and costly requirements” imposed by law schools that often reinforce an “elitist model of legal education.”

Whether the ABA constitutes a true monopoly can be (and likely will be) hotly contested. What is less debatable is the value of some competition or alternatives to the ABA. The organization is a textbook example of how the lack of competition can instill not just a sense of institutional impunity but arrogance.

For decades, the ABA has moved steadily to the left, taking on a greater level of advocacy and activism as an organization. When it was founded on August 21, 1878, in Saratoga Springs, New York, the 75 lawyers from 20 states (and the District of Columbia) were seeking an organization to create a national system of standards for “the advancement of the science of jurisprudence, the promotion of the administration of justice.” The profession at the time was a largely ad hoc and informal collection of state rules and apprentice-based systems.

The ABA brilliantly filled that void and helped professionalize lawyering through bar and educational standards. The dominance of the ABA was due to the fact that it filled that needed and uncontroversial role. As a result, some estimate that as many as half of the nation’s lawyers were members in 1979.

However, in the last few decades, the ABA followed the same trend as higher education and the media, as activists on the left took over key positions and used the organization to advance their own social, political, and legal viewpoints. Neutrality was tossed aside in favor of advocacy.

The shift at the ABA is illustrated in the long debate over abortion. For decades, abortion (and the constitutional basis for Roe v. Wade) has sharply divided not just the public but the bar as well. But in 1990, activists succeeded in getting the association’s House of Delegates to adopt a pro-abortion resolution that said that the right was protected under the Constitution (a view adopted but later rejected by the Supreme Court).

Many were shocked that the ABA would simply take a side on an issue that divided many legal scholars, lawyers, and judges. Another vote was taken and the members decided by a vote of 200 to 188 that the issue was “extremely divisive” and that the ABA should not take an organizational position.

But it did not matter to the activists that the group itself was divided down the middle. They came back and adopted a pro-abortion position again in 1992. This time, the vote was 276 to 168.

So, with almost 40 percent of the delegates asking the ABA to respect opposing views on a divisive matter of constitutional interpretation, the ABA simply muscled through the vote.

What followed was the opening of the floodgates for activists to get the ABA to declare on an array of divisive issues on the side of liberal interpretations and agendas. Not surprisingly, lawyers left the organization in droves.

Today, there are roughly 1.3 million lawyers in the United States. Even if the ABA represented just half of that number, it would have 650,000 members. However, by 2015, it had fallen to 400,000. Last year it fell to 227,000 members, or just 17 percent of the bar.

Notably, the American Medical Association — which also been accused of becoming increasingly political — has experienced the same drop from a high of representing 75 percent of the nation’s doctors to just 15 percent in recent years.

With the ABA representing less than two out of every 10 lawyers, it is still treated as the inviolate and indisputable voice of the profession.

The exodus from the ABA has left a leftist echo chamber that is similar to the one in higher education. The purging of conservatives and libertarians in academia has left many departments without a single Republican or conservative.

A Georgetown study recently found that only nine percent of law school professors identify as conservative at the top 50 law schools.

There is a symbiotic relationship between the ABA and law schools, as they feed off each other—giving each other awards and speaking opportunities. However, both are becoming largely irrelevant to the public at large.

The truly tragic fact is that it does not matter. As ABA leadership has presided over the decline of their institution, they are still personally rewarded for using it to amplify political values. They are thriving as their organization dies.

While these officials and academics would attract little attention in filings with the Supreme Court as individuals, they can generate endless headlines from an enabling media by declaring their views as the position of “America’s lawyers.” Those media rarely note that ABA now represents less than 20 percent of all lawyers.

Critics have objected that such filings show that the ABA’s interpretation of its mission is so “expansive and malleable … to cover just about anything.”

For example, the ABA filed on behalf of its members to declare that the Constitution demands that male transgender students should be able to use female bathrooms. In an amicus brief filed in 2017, the ABA stated that “[d]iversity and inclusion are essential to public confidence in the bench and bar.” It further asserted that if transgender students “are excluded from bathrooms that align with their gender identities,” they “are less likely to pursue a legal education, depriving the bar of voices capable of speaking on behalf of those marginalized for their gender.”

What percentage of lawyers do you think would support that claim?

The answer, again, is that it does not matter.

The ABA is likely to continue on this path. The costs are being borne by the organization not by its officers. The question is why states and universities should continue to treat the ABA as if it represented a significant percentage of lawyers in the U.S., let alone the values of a majority of such lawyers.

The ABA has long relied on the myth maintained by political and media allies that it is still the voice of American lawyers. A little competition would be a great help, not just to the profession but also to the ABA itself. It may yet be possible for this institution to return to its roots as a neutral body focused on professional standards.

I hope so. I miss the ABA.

Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro professor of public interest law at George Washington University and the author of the best-selling book “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage.”

Source:
https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/5 ... sociation/