The Official Ideology of American Law Schools

The AALS’s Dominance of Legal Education

The Association of American Law Schools (AALS) is not your typical fraternity of scholars. To begin with, its members are not individual law professors but 171 law schools. A law school is not legally required to join the AALS, but only a few obscure schools eschew membership. In its own words: “The AALS is legal education’s principal representative to the federal government and to other national higher education organizations and learned societies.”1

Technically, the AALS does not accredit law schools; it examines schools only for purposes of its own membership. The American Bar Association (ABA) makes national accreditation decisions. However, the AALS and ABA send combined teams that cooperate in evaluating law schools for their ostensibly separate purposes, and it is rare for a school that is not an AALS member to achieve