The Rules Crack

For 70 years, the rules of American legal education fit on a napkin. Go to an ABA-accredited school, pass the bar, practice anywhere in the country. The ABA (the national lawyers’ group) set the standards. Every state accepted the credential. The whole system ran on one shared key.

That key is starting to crack. It isn’t broken yet, but a crack in a load-bearing rule doesn’t have to go all the way through to do real damage.

2 things are happening at once. A new bar exam is rolling out, and it puts different states on different timelines through 2028. And a handful of states are walking away from the ABA’s hold on accreditation. Neither one alone is a catastrophe. Together, they add 2 more loads to a system already carrying more than it was built for.

The New Test

The NextGen bar exam debuts in July 2026 in 10 jurisdictions: Connecticut, Guam, Idaho, Maryland, Missouri, Northern Mariana Islands, Oregon, Palau, the Virgin Islands, and Washington.¹ A second wave arrives in July 2027. The big states, New York, Texas, Florida, California, Georgia, Ohio, Virginia, and more, come in July 2028.¹ California is on track to adopt the NextGen format plus an added California-specific component. The State Bar’s trustees signed off in May 2026, and final adoption sits with the California Supreme Court.¹ Nevada is doing its own thing entirely, a homegrown “Nevada Plan,” a 3-part licensing system, starting February 2027.¹

The design change is real and probably good. The old bar tested memory across up to 14 subjects. The NextGen tests roughly 8 subject areas, and it adds lawyering skills the old format almost entirely ignored: research, client counseling, negotiation, the things lawyers actually do. Bar examiners have argued for decades that the old test was a trivia marathon with little predictive value. The NextGen is their attempt to fix that.¹

So, fine. Progress.

But for a school already bleeding enrollment and cutting staff, “progress” means a curriculum overhaul nobody budgeted for. The NextGen tests differently, so schools have to teach differently. That means faculty development, new course materials, and a bar-prep pipeline that doesn’t exist yet in the same form. A well-funded school handles this without breaking stride. A school that already cut its bar-prep program to balance last year’s budget handles it badly, or not at all.

The rollout timeline creates its own chaos for schools whose graduates scatter across states. A student graduating in May 2027 from a school in a NextGen state could sit a completely different exam from her classmate who moves to a non-NextGen state the same month. Schools have to prepare graduates for both, which means teaching to 2 different frameworks at once, in some states through at least 2028. It’s not impossible. It is expensive and disruptive, exactly the kind of thing a stressed school does poorly.

Watch bar passage rates in 2027 and 2028. The schools that crack under the NextGen change won’t announce it. The first signal will be a bar passage number that quietly drops. That spooks the applicant pool, which shrinks the next class, which pushes the doom loop around one more time.

The Accreditation Crack

The ABA has been the only accreditor that mattered in American legal education for most of living memory. An ABA-accredited degree let you sit for the bar anywhere in the country. The credential was portable by design. That national portability was the middle market’s biggest selling point, especially for schools outside the top 20 that can’t promise Yale’s network or Chicago’s scholarship placement. They sold portability instead. Graduate here and you can go anywhere.

Texas stopped requiring ABA accreditation in January 2026, when the Texas Supreme Court finalized a September 2025 order moving accreditation authority to the Texas Supreme Court itself.² Florida followed. The Florida Supreme Court ended sole reliance on the ABA effective October 1, 2026, opening the door for alternative accreditors.² Ohio and Tennessee are weighing similar moves.²

I want to be precise about what this does and doesn’t mean as of mid-2026, because the honest version of this story is more unsettling than a sloppy one.

In the near term, of course, nothing changes for existing students at ABA schools. Their degrees still qualify. Graduates still sit for the bar. The accreditation change doesn’t retroactively invalidate anything already in the pipeline.² If you’re enrolled today, you’re fine.

The long-run signal is something else.

Once Texas and Florida accept alternative accreditors, the market for a law school credential starts to split. New players will appear: online schools, 2-year programs, corporate-backed training academies. Some will be serious and well-run. Some will be the law-school version of the for-profit college boom, credential mills that take tuition and produce graduates who can’t pass any bar, charging something like $15,000 instead of the current $55,000-plus private average.² The serious ones will look attractive to cost-sensitive applicants who don’t need national portability. The sketchy ones will create a scandal that poisons the whole reform conversation.

More importantly, the degree starts to behave like a driver’s license. Valid where issued, a hassle everywhere else.

A Texas-only accredited degree practices in Texas, and only Texas. Take that graduate to New York or California and you’re sitting for a bar in a state that doesn’t recognize the underlying credential. Fine if you plan to stay in Texas. If you don’t know yet where you’ll land, and most 22-year-olds deciding on law school don’t, it’s a serious problem. The middle market sold portability, and portability is now conditional in 2 major states, possibly more.

The JD doesn’t need to formally split into tiers for the market to start pricing it that way. Once applicants start asking “does this degree travel,” schools without a confident answer lose a selling point they’ve taken for granted for decades.

There’s a historical precedent for what happens when an accreditation cartel gets cracked. After the AMA (the American Medical Association) put its early-20th-century medical school standards in place, roughly half of the nation’s 160 medical schools closed or merged.³ The schools that couldn’t meet the new standard didn’t survive, and the ones that could consolidated the market. Olson documented this in 2011 as proof that an accreditation shock can trigger a closure cascade.³ The mechanism here runs in reverse, a loosening rather than a tightening. But loosening creates its own version of the problem. When anyone can get accredited, an ABA accreditation stops being a moat, and schools that built their entire pitch around that moat have to find a new one.

Force 7 and Force 8 both add cost and complexity right when law schools have the least capacity to absorb either.¹² The NextGen bar demands curriculum investment. The accreditation fracture demands a new answer to a question schools never had to answer before. Neither is immediately fatal. Both push the doom loop around again.

A prospective student sitting in 2026 should absorb this before signing anything. The schools most exposed to both forces are the schools recruiting the hardest right now. They’re offering the biggest scholarships to get you in the door, because they need your tuition. They’ve cut bar-prep support to stay solvent, so the NextGen change hits them harder. And their ABA accreditation is the only thing standing between their degree and a credential that won’t travel. When a student asks “is this school going to be around when I graduate,” the answer is in the bar passage trend, the discount rate, and the bond documents nobody reads, not in the rankings. Those numbers exist. You just have to look.

Watch: what the ABA's testing rules actually change

Is the LSAT Dead? The Truth About the ABA’s New Law School Rules

This chapter is from Anyone Can Beat the Law School Collapse by Steve Schwartz, LSAT Coach and Founder of LSAT Unplugged. I've been coaching the LSAT since 2005.

Published July 28, 2026.