# American Bar Association The largest voluntary association of lawyers in the United States, founded in 1878. Membership is optional and has been declining for years, but two of its functions carry real institutional weight — and both have become contested. ## The two powers that matter **1. Law school accreditation.** The ABA is the recognized accreditor of American law schools. In most states, graduating from an ABA-accredited school is a prerequisite for sitting the bar. That makes the association a gatekeeper for entry to the profession itself, and its standards — including those touching on diversity in admissions and hiring — a recurring target. **2. Judicial-nominee ratings.** The ABA's Standing Committee on the Federal Judiciary rates nominees to the federal bench as *well qualified*, *qualified*, or *not qualified*, based on interviews with lawyers and judges who have worked with the nominee. The ratings role is where the vault's interest concentrates. For decades the ABA was given advance access to evaluate nominees before their names were announced. That arrangement has been withdrawn and restored repeatedly depending on the administration, on the argument that the association is ideologically hostile — an argument sharpened when nominees advanced by the conservative legal movement received *not qualified* ratings. ## Why it matters for the KB The ABA is a clean instance of the pattern this vault tracks under professional-institution capture and delegitimization, and the structure is worth stating precisely. **A private association exercising quasi-public gatekeeping authority is durable only while both parties accept its neutrality.** Accreditation and nominee ratings were delegated to the ABA because a professional body was thought better placed than the government to judge professional competence. Once one side concludes the body is a partisan actor, the delegation becomes the target — not by repealing it, but by routing around it: strip the advance access, discount the ratings, propose alternative accreditors. That is the same move documented at [[Preclearance]] and across the vault's institutional material. **The formal power is left intact and the reliance on it is withdrawn**, which achieves the result without a fight over the rule itself. The [[Federalist Society]] is the relevant counterweight — an explicitly ideological legal network that supplies the credentialing function the ABA once monopolized, with the crucial difference that it never claimed neutrality. > [!warning] Thin page > Draft built to close a referenced-but-missing gap (8 inbound pages). Needs: the specific history of ratings-access withdrawal by administration with dates, the accreditation-standard fights, and membership-decline figures. ## See Also - [[Federalist Society]] — the ideological alternative credentialing network - [[Rule of Law]] · [[Preclearance]] — the same route-around-the-mechanism pattern