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Comment by the_real_cher | Hacker News Reader

Can anyone more familiar with this speculate what the potential implications are?

“ The change means law school graduates who want to practice in Texas are no longer required to attend an ABA-accredited school. The power to approve those law schools now rests solely with the state's highest civil court.”

It’s for control, more precisely political control

Does this mean a "No woke lawyers" rule in Texas? I'm asking in all seriousness, I could see such a rule happening.

That’s exactly what the end goal is. It’ll only be a matter of time before Texas has schools that don’t even attempt to teach impartiality.

Considering they explicitly cited DEI requirements as their impetus for change, this feels like a natural progression.

Conversely, it's about the state of Texas asserting control over an unaccountable third party who does things that run counter to the interests of the State and people of Texas. If the state's highest civil court misbehaves, the people of Texas have recourse. If the ABA misbehaves, the people of Texas can do... nothing.

From my perspective, I'd rather have a body held accountable to the people over which they are wielding power. Sometimes government makes sense.

> If the ABA misbehaves, the people of Texas can do... nothing.

Nothing precludes suing the ABA, it's a professional association not magic pixie dust.

I want to agree with you, however, how do we guarantee that the people of Texas have recourse via their government? Didn't the Texas state government have national headlines recently to enact anti-democratic gerrymandering?

Correct, there is no recourse, they've used their 30 years of hard-core ideological Republican uni-party control to remove any possibility of opposition. Besides gerrymandering they're constantly attacking Houston's ability to self govern, kicking democrat voters off the rolls, making it harder for city residents to vote.

Texas is a state that do not pay their elected officials enough money to live off of. It is designed to support the wealth and not the poor. A wealth elected official does not need a second job but a poor one does.

This leads to disproportional balance in power between the working class and the wealth.

[0] https://salaries.texastribune.org/departments/house-of-repre...

Struggling to understand here, what is this mystical malfeasance that the ABA has done?

All it does is set minimum standards for the state bar exams and publish best practices for state bar associations.

> If the ABA misbehaves, the people of Texas can do... nothing.

That seems like a very interesting perspective to offer in response to an article about the government of Texas stripping the ABA of the ability to approve law schools.

While it's not obvious this action was in response to any particular misbehavior by the ABA, clearly the possibility of such action would serve as an accountability mechanism that offered recourse to the good people of Texas in the event of any misbehavior.

Correct it's part of a multi decade right wing effort to replace the ABA with the ideological Federalist Society. Trump's judges were the first that did not get ABA recommendations but were all Federalists. In Texas it seems more of a naked power grab. They want no ethics, no standards, no expertise, just raw political power.

“Replacing the ABA” implies that the ABA has some formal status to begin with. It doesn’t. The ABA is just a private organization.

The headline and the contents of the article make it quite clear that's not true.

> The Texas Supreme Court decided which law schools would satisfy law licensure requirements until 1983, when the court gave that responsibility to the ABA.

That doesn’t change the fact that the ABA is a private organization. The court shouldn’t have delegated a government function to a private body in the first place.

No one is contesting the private organization part. Just the wrong part of your post.

Your original post is premised on the implication that the ABA has some sort of public status. Otherwise, it makes no sense. It's like saying "there's a right wing effort to replace Coke with Pepsi." Okay, so what?

You said the ABA had no "formal status". That bit was very clearly incorrect, as Texas's Supreme Court just revoked that formal status.

(Incidentally, the original post about replacing the ABA wasn't mine, either.)

My point above is that the ABA is the same kind of thing as the Federalist Society. They’re both private organizations. The ABA isn’t some sort of quasi-public body.

The fact that the Texas Supreme Court previously relied on the ABA’s list of accredited schools doesn’t change what kind of thing the ABA is. In CS terms, the Texas Supreme Court rules just had a pointer to the ABA list. That doesn’t change the nature of the object to which it points.

As the article clearly explains, the ABA had the formal status that the Texas Supreme Curt granted them in 1983. What we have now is a change of that policy, giving that power to a political body (an elected Supreme Court) without providing a reason. Doesn't feel like "small government" to me.

> The all-Republican court hasn't given a reason for initiating the change, but it came after months of conflict between President Donald Trump, the ABA and the broader legal community.

Republicans have never been about small government, they just use that as a talking point against the government when it’s providing nice things that benefit everyone (including liberals, which they would happily shoot their own foot off if it meant some shrapnel hit a liberal), and their base is too ignorant or evil to care.

> Doesn't feel like "small government" to me.

The "small government" GOP was a mistaken detour of the late 20th century that died precisely because it was susceptible to stupid ideas like outsourcing a core government function--accreditation in a profession deeply intertwined with government itself--to private parties. Lincoln's GOP was not a small government party, and neither is Trump's GOP.

Its fascinating to watch you twist yourself into knots justifying all types of contradictory actions after they have happened. You are certainly committed to the bit. This is another case where you failed to do any research and are provably false. The Republican Party of Texas wrote an actual party platform in 2024 and limited government is an explicitly stated part of that platform. [0]

Since you brought up Trump, even though he isn't involved in this action. Here is a video of him from February 2025 stating that he is making government smaller. [1]

I'm sure you will come back with some new red herring, but the evidence is here for others to view.

[0] https://texasgop.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/2024-RPT-Pla...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/ucen_wGy2mY

You’re playing word games. The 2024 Texas GOP platform says: “Limiting government power to those items enumerated in the United States and Texas Constitutions.”

Limiting government power to enumerated areas is different than “small government.” The Texas constitution grants the legislature and the supreme court with power over judicial administration. That includes governing the practice of law in the courts of the state. There’s no enumerated powers problem with the Texas Supreme Court Court deciding what law schools qualify to be admitted to its own bar.

If you keep reading to point #9 on Constitutional Issues, they say "Limiting Overreaching State Government: We recognize that the sovereignty of this State and its citizenry has been imperiled and threatened by the ongoing overreach of state elected officials and agencies."

It's pretty clear that they only mean "overreach" where they don't politically agree. They are perfectly fine when the Governor overrides local rules and ordinances [0] [1] [2], because it furthers their political goals of consolidating power with the Executive rather than the stated goal of limiting government. This action expands the scope and role of government in Texan's lives, that is a fact.

> There’s no enumerated powers problem with the Texas Supreme Court Court deciding what law schools qualify to be admitted to its own bar.

No, it's a political powers problem, which is one of the main things they claim to be against increasing.

[0] https://www.texastribune.org/2023/06/07/texas-republicans-ci...

[1] https://www.allensworthlaw.com/legal-updates/governor-overru...

[2] https://fedsoc.org/scdw/supreme-court-of-texas-holds-governo...

Lincoln’s gop was hated by conservatives and the south and loved by black people. The exact opposite of trump’s gop.

If the ABA had no formal status then we wouldn’t be having this discussion. In fact, the Department of Education formally recognizes the ABA as the accrediting body since 1923. In fairness, conservatives are trying to get rid of the Department of Education as well.

https://web.archive.org/web/20170427221010/https://www2.ed.g...

I notice the ed.gov page has gone missing. I wonder why.

This is a better article on the topic explaining that the ABA's requirements for different forms of diversity oppose the administration's ban on DEI. It also points out that this could lower the cost of law school by reducing superfluous requirements for law school accreditation.

https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/texas-becomes-first...

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