The University of Austin, the young higher education institution co-founded by prominent public figures including CBS News Editor in Chief Bari Weiss, has announced that it will bypass the American Bar Association Accreditation Council entirely for its developing legal education program.
The decision marks a bold step for the five-year-old institution, which first opened its doors to students in the fall of 2024 and is still actively pursuing broader institutional accreditation, having recently achieved candidate status with its primary regional accreditor. By opting out of the traditional route overseen by the ABA Council, the university is positioning itself outside the mainstream framework that governs the vast majority of American law schools.
The announcement arrives amid a period of intense regulatory and political scrutiny directed at the ABA Council. Last month, the U.S. Department of Education issued a recommendation that the council lose its federal recognition to accredit law schools. If finalized, this move would mean that degrees from ABA-accredited institutions would no longer automatically unlock federal student aid in the same manner under certain interpretations, though the broader implications continue to unfold across the higher education landscape.
At the same time, the ABA Council has faced significant headwinds from conservative-leaning state governments and policymakers. Critics have increasingly targeted the organization over its past and current policies, particularly its historical support for diversity, equity, and inclusion standards within legal education. These tensions recently manifested locally in Texas, where the state Supreme Court adjusted its rules to allow individuals who have not graduated from an ABA-accredited law school to sit for the bar and practice law within the state, bypassing decades-old oversight norms as part of a broader shift in the region.
In a lengthy Substack post published on Thursday, UATX General Counsel Adam Biggs laid out the institution’s grievances and outlined a sharply critical perspective on the American Bar Association and its influence over the legal profession.
"The ABA is a private trade association that has spent seventy years making sure no one builds a law school that doesn’t conform to its exact vision for legal education," Biggs wrote in the post. He argued that the institutional model enforced by the council is both excessively expensive and fundamentally outdated, asserting that it actively stifles innovation and marginalizes anyone attempting to construct an alternative educational paradigm.
As part of its strategy for undergraduate legal education, Biggs announced that UATX will forge a partnership with the conservative Federalist Society. This collaboration is intended to support specialized courses designed to delve more deeply into the text, history, and tradition of the United States Constitution, with instruction delivered by a practitioner-heavy faculty consisting of sitting and retired judges, practicing attorneys, and traditional scholars.
Biggs went on to criticize specific ABA regulatory standards, including mandatory requirements concerning tenured faculty positions and institutional governance. He drew particular attention to the council’s rules that make the establishment of clinical legal education programs practically unavoidable for accredited schools.
While acknowledging that hands-on clinical experience for students often sounds appealing in the abstract, Biggs contended that it represents the most financially inefficient method of instruction imaginable. He contrasted the economics of a traditional lecture course, where a single professor can instruct hundreds of students simultaneously, with the resource-intensive nature of legal clinics where a clinical professor typically works closely with a cohort of only about eight students.
Furthermore, Biggs connected the traditional "ABA-enforced pipeline" to what he characterized as a persistent left-leaning skew among faculty members and student bodies across the nation’s law schools. He asserted that the legal clinics operating within these traditional institutions overwhelmingly devote their resources to supporting progressive and left-leaning causes. He explicitly denounced what he described as a grievance-based approach to the study of the law, arguing that it ultimately undermines the objective pursuit of truth and instills among students the counterproductive belief that the U.S. Constitution and the broader American republic are obstacles that need to be dismantled rather than foundational frameworks to be preserved.
The critique also touched heavily upon the escalating financial burden of legal training in the United States. Addressing the steep tuition costs and subsequent debt loads carried by modern law graduates, Biggs argued that aspiring lawyers dedicated to public service or ordinary American communities should not be forced to abandon their professional callings simply because servicing massive student loans requires accepting a high-paying position at a large corporate law firm.
In response to the announcement and the sweeping criticisms leveled by university officials, Melissa Hart, chair of the ABA Council, defended the organization’s record and methodology in an emailed statement. Hart emphasized that the council proudly accredits a diverse array of law schools representing a wide spectrum of institutional missions and intellectual perspectives. She noted that these accredited schools routinely innovate across all facets of their academic programs while maintaining rigorous minimum standards that consistently produce strong professional outcomes for their graduates.
Hart also pointed to the existing legal framework governing admission to the bar across various jurisdictions, observing that state authorities have long recognized alternative pathways for law schools that choose not to pursue council accreditation for their own unique reasons. She expressed confidence that the established system—which combines national accreditation to ensure degree portability with parallel state-level pathways to practice—has served the legal profession effectively for many years and will continue to function smoothly as the University of Austin proceeds with the development of its own legal program.
