Defending Education Submits Public Comment on Tennessee Supreme Court’s Potential Regulatory Reforms to Increase Access to Quality Legal Representation

On March 16, 2026, Defending Education (DE) submitted a comment to the Tennessee Supreme Court in response to its request for comments on potential reforms to the rules governing admission to the Tennessee bar. Those possible reforms include reducing or eliminating its reliance on American Bar Association accreditation in setting minimum educational requirements for applicants to the Tennessee Bar.

Simply put, the ABA should have no role in accrediting law schools. Though it claims to speak for the legal profession as a whole, the ABA is an ideologically motivated activist organization representing a tiny fraction of the nation’s practicing lawyers, and it regularly endorses and litigates for divisive political causes. And that activism bleeds into the ABA’s accreditation standards, which are designed to promote the Association’s ideological goals rather than ensure academic quality. Under threat of losing their accreditation, the ABA has compelled American law schools to adopt discriminatory admissions and hiring practices and to parrot the ABA’s views on issues of diversity and “bias” in the legal profession.

Tennessee does not need to be shackled to the ABA and its ideological bias to ensure that law students are ready to sit for the bar exam and enter the practice of law. As the rule changes adopted by Texas and Florida demonstrate, there is more than one path to reform. This Court is free to pursue alternative models for accrediting law schools that do not force schools to discriminate or violate academic freedom. DE encourages the Court to do so.