For more than a century, the American Bar Association has functioned as the de facto national gatekeeper of legal education. Its accreditation decisions effectively determine which law schools count as legitimate, which graduates may sit for state bar exams, and, by extension, who may enter the legal profession. That arrangement is now being challenged. Thank goodness.

Because state constitutions generally provide the judiciary with the authority to control the practice of law, state supreme courts also regulate the competence and integrity of those who appear before them. As a consequence, the power to decide who may enter the legal profession in the first place has long been treated as an essential judicial function, as well.

The ABA's role in this process exists only because courts historically chose to rely on its accreditation standards as a convenient proxy for educational adequacy. That dependence was always voluntary, and courts may withdraw it at any time, because the underlying regulatory power has always belonged to them. For most of the 20th century, though, the ABA's authority hardened into an unexamined monopoly--one that shaped the structure, cost, and ideology of legal education in a decidedly leftist fashion.

Conservative lawmakers, judges, and legal activists (like me) have........

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