CHE reports:

A report from the Education Department is recommending that the accrediting arm of the American Bar Association lose its federal recognition. If approved, the accrediting agency, called the Council of the Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar, would no longer be eligible to serve as a gatekeeper of federal financial aid for the law schools it oversees.

The loss of recognition would have no effect on the ability of most of the council’s members to receive federal financial aid. Among its roughly 200 members, all but a handful are also accredited by one of the major institutional accreditors….

The staff report will be reviewed next month by the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity, an 18-member panel that makes recommendations to the education secretary on whether to grant federal recognition. After that, Nicholas Kent, the undersecretary of education, will make a determination on whether to continue the accreditor’s status as a gatekeeper. The accreditor can then appeal the decision and could sue the department if it loses that appeal.

Many law faculty will no doubt welcome this news, given, for example, the ABA’s bad behavior in trying to micro-regulate experiential credits , a longstanding battle. On the other hand, the ABA requires accredited law schools to offer tenure, to maintain an adequate library, to protect academic freedom, and other things that are good for legal education, for faculty, and for students. One can only imagine what Trump-approved alternative accreditors would be like on those scores (e.g.,, I can imagine them getting rid of tenure requirements). So the best-case scenario would be that the ABA remains as an accreditor, but behaves better going forward.

(Note that even if the ABA loses its status as law school accreditor, that would not affect its ability to affect eligibility to sit for the bar exam, at least in those states that have not displaced it from that role already.)