Politicians started chipping away at the American Bar Association’s law school accreditation authority over the last several months. First, a number of states — including, importantly, Texas — announced that they would stop respecting the ABA’s century of experience vetting legal education. Then the federal government stepped in, with the FTC disingenuously claiming ABA accreditation contributes to rising tuition, followed by the Education Department recommending yanking the ABA’s federal recognition altogether.
Now we’re getting our first look at what an unregulated legal education environment might look like and of course it involves the Federalist Society and Bari Weiss University.
The University of Austin was founded by, among others, Weiss and Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale and marketed — sometimes explicitly and sometimes stealthily — as an “anti-woke” institution. Basically, the school offers an unaccredited safe space for students who want to read John Locke inside an echo chamber of vapid culture war tropes. Which, of course, closely resembles the hellscape that Weiss — who has said that the ideological spectrum of acceptable discourse should run from Alan Dershowitz to Dana Loesch — hopes to midwife.
Larry Summers was once on the advisory board for this school and walked away because he was “not comfortable with the course that UATX has set.” That dude couldn’t walk away from Jeffrey Epstein but took a hard pass on this university.
As functionally a series of right-wing TEDx talks dressed up as a school, the University of Austin doesn’t have a law school yet, but it has big plans to bring one online as early as 2028. And it took its first step down that road with a Substack manifesto titled: “Save the Constitution. Ditch the ABA,” announcing that it is teaming up with the Federalist Society to build a new undergrad law program as a precursor to a full law school.
UATX general counsel Adam Biggs describes it as “building the future of legal education,” which is fair in that dystopias are a kind of “future.”
We begin in the undergrad program because the people who will defend the Constitution are formed before they set foot in law school. With the Federalist Society’s support, we are deepening what we offer our undergraduates with new courses that go further into the Constitution’s text, history, and tradition, taught by judges, practicing lawyers, and scholars. We will host debates on the biggest legal questions shaping society. This will be the most substantial learning experience any student interested in law can have anywhere.
Ooooooh. You took an undergrad constitutional law course? Guys, drop everything, we’ve got to admit this kid with a con law survey course from an unaccredited school run out of an office building!
For decades, the Federalist Society has maintained that it’s just a social club for students to get together, listen to salon-style debates, and performatively eat Chick-fil-A to own the libs. In reality, the group has taken on a leading role in the “No More Souters”-industrial complex, serving as the default vetting and networking pipeline for the right-wing legal movement. It’s a branding that they’ve enforced hard enough that in 2022, they told co-founder Steven Calabresi he could no longer call himself a “founder” after he committed limited ideological heresy. Now they’re drawing up plans for a full curriculum to become a sort of bargain bin PragerU law school.
To some degree, the Federalist Society is suffering the same fate as the ABA. Last May, Trump called Federalist Society honcho Leonard Leo a “sleazebag” who “probably hates America” after Trump appointees had the temerity to rule against him. That said, no one really thinks the Federalist Society has lost its prized position in the conservative legal movement pipeline. Its establishment voices may carry less weight with this administration than they did in the past, but Federalist Society bona fides remain a necessary if no longer sufficient condition within the movement.
Keeping the Constitution demands lawyers who understand its original meaning, and fewer and fewer do. At the University of Austin (UATX), we built a tuition-free undergraduate program to form citizens and leaders who not only know our founding principles but will defend them. But the country needs a bigger, bolder version of that program, one that forms its future lawyers the same way. We will build it, and we cannot let anyone stand in the way, least of all the American Bar Association (ABA).
Yes, the problem is the shortage of judges obsessed with “original meaning.”
At least the post foregrounds its interest in setting up a program more focused on ideology than actually learning the law. It will take detours to indulge the canard that ABA accreditation drives up tuition — as opposed to U.S. News ranking criteria and cuts to support for public institutions. The ABA admitted its standards contributed to higher faculty salaries, but comparing a 5 percent faculty raise to building new high-tech student centers for the brochures is… well, sort of like comparing the University of Austin to the University of Texas at Austin.
Though it’s not clear why any of this would matter to the University of Austin since they’re tuition free, backed by a $100 million donation from Jeff Yass. Scolding the education system for high costs reads less genuine when it’s coming from a school funded on billionaire bucks.
Then there are the clinics, which act as small law firms inside the law school. The ABA’s standards make creating clinics largely unavoidable.
Students working real cases sounds good, in the abstract. Yet it is the most expensive way to teach anything. A professor teaching Property reaches hundreds of students. A clinical professor works with about eight.
Nothing says you’ve got your finger on the pulse of the issues facing legal education like a hard stance against practical training. Law firms have started hiring fewer graduates — well, fewer students… they aren’t even waiting for them to graduate anymore — and the conventional wisdom is that artificial intelligence will drive down the need for young associates even further. And with that, the burden of practical training, which historically skewed more toward the firms, may shift back onto the law schools. Meanwhile, the Federalist Society is eyeing a curriculum with more lecture halls.
Good luck with that.
But then, like salmon returning to the rivers where they were spawned, the post gets back to culture war grievances:
The entrenchment of these politics has likewise led to a deeper failure at these institutions. Too many students now graduate fluent in critical theory yet strangers to the Federalist Papers, trained to critique the Constitution before they understand the tradition that produced it. The grievance-based study of the law undermines the pursuit of truth and instills the belief that the Constitution and our republic are obstacles to be torn down.
“Fluent in critical theory yet strangers to the Federalist Papers” plays well to a cable news audience of non-lawyers, but it should face a steep challenge to anyone whose brain isn’t completely cooked. A more fair description of law school would be “fluent in comparative negligence yet strangers to the Federalist Papers” because the former has a lot more relevance to the actual lived experience of attending law school than either alternative.
But even with Texas breaking from the ABA on law school accreditation, the state supreme court couched its move in terms that could pose problems for this plan. When that court took the accreditation job itself in January, it went out of its way to promise it would seek to preserve the ability of its graduates to use their Texas degrees in other states. Which means Texas cannot approve a school built on the explicit premise of ignoring national standards without breaking from the framework it laid out over the winter.
You guys, I don’t think ASSLaw has anything to worry about.
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news.
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