The American Bar Association — the organization that literally decides who gets to become a lawyer in this country — just voted to eliminate its DEI accreditation mandate for law schools. The group's Council of the Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar pulled the plug last Friday moving from a temporary suspension to outright repeal. Another woke domino falls.
Turns out when the Supreme Court tells you the emperor has no clothes, eventually even the lawyers stop pretending they can see the outfit.
The rule in question was Standard 206, originally titled "Diversity and Inclusion" before someone decided that was too on-the-nose and renamed it "Access to Legal Education and the Profession." Because nothing says "we're totally not doing DEI anymore" like slapping a new label on the exact same thing. The standard governed diversity requirements in recruitment, admissions, and student programming — meaning if your law school didn't genuflect at the altar of "diversity" ideology, you risked losing your accreditation. Your entire ability to operate. Over a bureaucratic checkbox.
The ABA had already suspended Standard 206 back in February 2025, with the suspension set to run through August 31, 2026. But now they've decided to skip the pretense of a timeout and just kill it entirely. It's the institutional equivalent of realizing the milk isn't going to un-expire if you just leave it in the fridge longer.
One council member reportedly admitted they personally agreed with the diversity standard's aims but believed the accreditor should eliminate it to avoid — and this is beautiful — "inhibiting diversity of ideas in legal education." Read that again. A DEI supporter just acknowledged that DEI inhibits actual diversity. We've reached the snake-eating-its-own-tail phase of the movement.
This didn't happen in a vacuum. The Trump administration has been systematically dismantling DEI infrastructure across federal agencies and higher education. The Supreme Court already torched race-based admissions. Universities are scrambling to rebrand their diversity offices as "belonging" centers or "community engagement" hubs, which is about as convincing as a guy in a trench coat telling you the watches are real.
The vote still needs final approval from the ABA House of Delegates, so technically there's one more hoop. But let's be honest — when the council that oversees legal education has already said "we're done," the House of Delegates isn't going to suddenly discover a backbone they've never had before.
What makes this particular surrender so satisfying is the source. This isn't some red-state legislature or a Trump executive order. This is the ABA. The legal establishment's establishment. The people who write the rules for every law school in America. When they wave the white flag on DEI, it means the war is over and our side won. The only people who don't know it yet are the ones still updating their "Diversity Statement" for tenure applications.
For years, these accreditation requirements were used as a cudgel to force ideological conformity on legal education. Agree with us or lose your accreditation. Teach what we approve or watch your enrollment dry up. It was a shakedown wearing an academic robe.
Now it's dead. And every law school dean in America just exhaled for the first time in a decade.
As reported by 100 Percent Fed Up, the ABA's move is the latest in a string of institutional retreats from DEI mandates. The question isn't whether more will follow. It's whether anyone will even bother defending the corpse.