By Ava Schwab | Reporter
In a legal battle that ended last month, the Texas Supreme Court split with the American Bar Association over credentials.
Texas reconstructs and reviews whether attending an ABA-accredited law school should be mandatory to take the Texas bar exam, the test that certifies law school graduates to practice.
At Baylor, where students still juggle LSAT prep sessions and attend debate tournaments, the news lands differently. Anastasia Keeler, Austin senior and a political science major, doesn’t see the shift as liberation, but as a risk.
“I think the bar should be required,” Keeler said. “It’s grueling, but if you’re defending people’s rights and due process, you should go through that process to become a licensed attorney.”
The change centers on who can sit for the exam, potentially allowing graduates of non-ABA-accredited law schools to qualify, rather than removing the exam entirely.
This decision is a part of a broader move that signals a potential shift away from the ABA’s full oversight of legal education in Texas. According to KERA News, the Court now sets off to establish their own accreditation standards for such a process, describing the changing of licensure as an effort to make the process more objective and “ideologically neutral.”
Keeler spoke with the precision of someone who’s spent weekends arguing labor law in cold hotel conference rooms. On Baylor’s debate team, Keeler has spent the year learning the ins and outs of a single topic, dismantling and defending it until the words are her own. She called it the “best training she could have asked for.”
Her pre-law path reads like a syllabus: logic, political theory, mentoring younger students, picking their freshman classes, editing their resumes and planning panels on grad-school admissions.
“It’s teamwork,” Keeler said. “Helping younger students figure out their place.”
San Antonio junior and pre-law student Kristen Silvasy holds a view similar to Keeler’s.
“There should be a standard everyone has to take,” Silvasy said. “There has to be something that keeps the quality of the profession consistent, especially when it comes to law.”
Silvasy added that while she supports the profession of law itself, skipping some steps for accreditation feels like skipping a safeguard. Without this, she said it could be dangerous.
“It’s a great profession, and more people should go into it,” Silvasy said. “But there still needs to be that step that proves you’re ready.”
Reasons remain unclear as to the shift, and Texas is the first state to make this move. Other states such as Florida, Ohio and Tennessee are reportedly looking into making the very same change.
The decision may have been about access, but for these students it seems like uncertainty. Keeler thinks it may be hard to mark the moment between student and attorney.
Keeler said the change is comparable to dismantling medical residencies, and students could be skipping a “crucial step” that she thinks proves they can do the job.
