Florida’s Search for ABA Alternative Sparks Accreditation Debate

The Florida Supreme Court should allow people without an American Bar Association-accredited JD to take the state’s bar exam, according to comments submitted to a state workgroup.

Records obtained by Bloomberg Law show comments submitted by practitioners and an online law school to the workgroup—formed after Trump administration threats to end ABA law school accreditation due to DEI—were all in favor of broadening access to Florida’s exam.

That test holds the key to legal practice in America’s third largest state—a jurisdiction with 100,000 lawyers that doesn’t give license reciprocity to seasoned out-of-state attorneys looking to relocate.

While Florida joins a growing list of states considering expanded admission, the state’s 12 accredited law schools are in talks with the commission to ensure recommendations don’t jeopardize in-state graduates’ ability to practice across the country—because there’s no current alternative to ABA accreditation universally accepted in every state.

“What everyone who is thinking about this needs to understand is the importance of nationwide accreditation,” said Stetson University College of Law Dean D. Benjamin Barros. “If you don’t have the ABA, then what?”

Rebuffing the ABA

Since 1992 the ABA has been the only accreditor recognized by the Florida Supreme Court.

But in March Chief Justice Carlos G. Muñiz questioned that position, blasting the ABA’s diversity, equity, and inclusion requirements, and forming a workgroup led by conservative former Justice Ricky Polston.

If other accreditors were accepted or required, law school deans worry about the cost and work of meeting additional requirements. The ABA’s law school approval standards run more than 100 pages, tackling subjects like curriculum, faculty size, and library resources.

Recently the ABA has expanded requirements focusing, it seems, on best practices rather than minimum regulation necessary for quality education and consumer protection, said former University of Miami Law School dean, and current professor, David Yellen. ABA proposals to double students’ hands-on-learning requirements and require employment protection for full-time faculty are drawing wide criticism.

Vast compliance mandates put pressure on smaller schools’ budgets, said Ave Maria School of Law Dean John Czarnetzky.

“In a universe where dollars are not unlimited, and Ave Maria is one of those universes, I’m going to have to find those dollars and take them from something else,” he said of the Catholic law school with 300 total students.

The ABA offered to meet with Florida’s workgroup, according to a letter submitted to the supreme court. The workgroup told the ABA it could submit materials along with members of the public.

The ABA plans to submit comments, Jennifer Rosato Perea, managing director of the ABA’s Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar, said in an email.

Her group always welcomes “the opportunity to share information about the work the Council does to promote quality legal education in the United States and to explain how we have been able to provide a national standard of quality for legal education across every U.S. jurisdiction so that graduates’ law degrees are portable among states,” she said.

Polston, a partner at Shutts & Bowen LLP, declined to comment. The workgroup must submit its report by Sept. 30.

Competition

There’s another way to make degrees portable—accept schools accredited by other states or groups.

That’s what Los Angeles-based Purdue Global Law School Dean Martin Pritikin advocated in a 12-page letter urging the justices to allow students to sit for the bar if they graduate with JDs from institutions accredited by the ABA “or another U.S. national or state-level law school accrediting or approving body.” That would allow graduates of online-only Purdue, which costs far less than a brick-and-mortar school, to sit for Florida’s bar.

Other states have moved that direction in hopes that increasing bar passage could help remedy attorney shortages, particularly in rural areas.

Indiana allows students from California-accredited schools like Purdue to sit for its state bar. Another handful of states have processes for reviewing and approving non-ABA accredited schools, and last month state supreme court justices from Utah to Maryland expressed interest in broadening bar access at a University of Wisconsin Law School panel.

“Because the cost of operating a law school fully online is lower, tuition is lower,” Pritikin said in his letter. “And because students do not need to move and can work while attending law school, they are less likely to take out loans to cover living expenses.”

Czarnetzky said he was glad to see the court’s order. He thinks it might be possible to create a national accreditor with streamlined requirements, or one for religious institutions.

“We have a monopolist,” he said of the ABA. “Let’s study whether the costs are worth it, and whether a different accreditor would make sense.”