Last week’s column demonstrated the harm, suffered by black students, that results from law school race-based admission policies. The bottom line was that black students who might have done well at lower-tier law schools were recruited to more highly competitive law schools and turned into failures. One might be tempted to place the full blame for such callousness on deans of law schools, but the true villain is the American Bar Association.

The American Bar Association is the accreditation agency for all law schools. If a law school has not been accredited by the ABA, it is ineligible for federal funding and its students are ineligible for student loans. Most states do not allow graduates of a non-ABA-accredited law school to sit for the bar examination. As professor Gail Heriot says in her article “Affirmative Action in American Law Schools,” in the Journal of Contemporary Legal Issues (2008), “A law school that is not in the good graces of the ABA is thus not a law school at all.”