In defense of the ABA's role in accrediting law schools, under fire for the ABA's pending insistence that all law schools use racial preferences even if they are illegal under federal or state law, Wade Henderson, executive director of the Leadership Council on Civil Rights, says: "The ABA has a long, well-respected tradition of accrediting law schools." That's one way of putting it. Another way of putting it is that the ABA has a long history of trying to cartelize the profession through accreditation standards, and that historically part of the purpose of these standards was to exclude Jews and other non-WASPs. From an article by James Moliterno in the Wake Forest Law Review:

One way the elite tried to exclude outsiders was through its attempt to set higher educational standards and higher bar admission standards. The elite lawyers were troubled by the influx of immigrants and Jews into the legal profession--many of whom went to law school by night or via correspondence courses. Night schools, observed the Dean of the Wisconsin law school, enrolled "a very large portion of foreign names." An ABA committee recommended that the character of the bar could be improved by raising educational standards in order to "purify the stream at the source."

And need I mention the irony of Mr. Henderson's comment in light of the fact that the ABA excluded African Americans from membership until 1954?(!)