In the United States, nearly all legal education runs through one gate: the American Bar Association. The ABA is a private, non-governmental entity that holds exclusive accreditation authority over law schools. That means that if a student wants to sit for the bar exam in most states, they must attend an ABA-accredited law school: no ABA stamp, no license.

This centralized control has created a high-cost, one-size-fits-all legal education system that is largely unresponsive to the needs of communities—or even students.

ABA accreditation teams are often led by law professors. Only one judge or lawyer is on a typical site team. That academic weight shapes what gets valued: scholarly output, institutional prestige, faculty credentials. The result is a system where law schools are incentivized to chase rankings, not relevance.

Students are taught to "think like a lawyer," but more often, they’re just learning to think like law professors. Theoretical analysis, law review writing, abstract hypotheticals. They are valuable in some contexts, but far removed from the day-to-day work of real legal practice.

This disconnect hurts everyone. It reinforces an internal, academic view of law that distances students from clients, from communities, and from the actual skills needed to serve them.

Entrepreneurial or community-anchored models of legal education face enormous barriers. Even when these programs show real promise, they’re only permitted as supplemental—not substitute—paths. The standard three-year law school remains the only “valid” route.

And the ABA's institutional requirements create de facto rules about who can even try. There's no official rule that a law school must be partnered with a university, but the capital requirements make it nearly impossible to start a program without one.

Just look at Concordia Law School. It offered a serious program but struggled with accreditation because it lacked a strong university partner. The ABA's focus on financial infrastructure over innovative delivery narrowed the field—again.

During the 2008 housing crash, as jobs evaporated, people flooded into law school. The thinking was simple: if everything else fails, the law is safe. But it wasn’t. Law schools raised tuition, juggled numbers to inflate employment stats, and the ABA let it happen. Schools played games with the employment data—counting baristas as “employed,” lumping temp gigs in with legal jobs, and running self-funded “bridge” programs to pad their numbers.

At the same time, they made excuses for declining LSAT scores and falling GPAs. “Holistic admissions” became the cover for expanding class sizes to keep the tuition flowing, even as bar passage rates dropped and job outcomes worsened.

Thousands of students graduated into a saturated market with massive debt. They had no jobs, no off-ramp, and no support. The ABA stayed silent while law schools chased tuition dollars. The institutions didn’t pay the cost of being wrong—it was paid by the students.

Now, artificial intelligence is reshaping the legal profession all over again. Routine research and drafting tasks that were once the domain of junior associates are being automated. Clients expect faster and cheaper results. The profession is shifting—hard—toward roles that require emotional intelligence, communication, ethical judgment, and real human interaction.

In short, practical and social skills are becoming the most valuable currency in law. And yet, law schools barely touch them. Outside of a handful of legal clinics or externships (typically limited in scope and availability)students spend most of their time in lecture halls, parsing appellate opinions, and writing for an academic audience. The gap between what’s taught and what’s needed continues to widen.

The ABA model creates an artificial scarcity. Tightly controlling who can train lawyers and how they’re trained limits supply. That drives up tuition. That drives up debt. And that shrinks the range of education models available to students—especially those from underserved backgrounds.

It’s a structural failure in a system that claims to prepare people for justice.

The dominance of the ABA has created an expensive, brittle model of legal education. It’s failing students, ignoring communities, and making it nearly impossible to reimagine how legal training could look—especially for rural areas and underrepresented groups.

It doesn’t have to be this way. However, unless states like Texas assert their authority and open doors for new models, the legal profession will remain stuck in a 20th-century mold—no matter how urgent the needs of the 21st century.