The American Accreditation Registrar (AAR) is an independent 501(c)(6) business league founded July 4, 2025, for attorneys, legal scholars, students, and other justice-oriented legal professionals.

AAR was created around a simple proposition:

No private professional system should have the final word on what justice requires.

The American legal profession has developed through an interconnected system of courts, bar associations, law schools, accreditation standards, professional rules, continuing education, disciplinary institutions, and professional customs.

Much of that structure performs necessary and valuable work.

But legal institutions are created and operated by human beings. Their doctrines can be mistaken. Their professional assumptions can become entrenched. Their traditions can survive long after the historical conditions that produced them have disappeared.

A profession entrusted with helping the public obtain justice should therefore remain open to institutional competition, ethical criticism, and professional alternatives.

The American Accreditation Registrar was created to provide one.

On This Page

I. Why AAR Exists

II. Professional Competition for the Legal System

↳ This Debate Is Already Happening

III. From the English Bar to the American Revolution

↳ Professional Reform Is Not Disloyalty to Law

↳ 1877, 1878, and 1890: A Period Worth Reexamining

↳ The ABA’s Racial and Gender History

↳ AAR and Government Immunity

IV. What the Iowa Rules Themselves Say

V. A Different Ethical Commitment

VI. What AAR Does Not Do

VII. Long-Term Goal: Compete in Legal Education and Accreditation

VIII. AAR and Justice Across Iowa: A Profession With New Work to Do

IX. Join the Professional Community

Endnotes and Sources

I. Why AAR Exists

Many attorneys enter the legal profession because they believe in justice.

Yet some eventually encounter a difficult tension between what they entered the profession hoping to accomplish and the institutional environment in which law is practiced.

Attorneys operate within duties to clients, courts, employers, firms, governmental agencies, professional rules, precedent, and existing legal institutions. Those obligations are often legitimate and necessary. But they can also place lawyers in difficult positions when an established doctrine, professional convention, or institutional practice itself appears to obstruct justice.

The American Accreditation Registrar exists to create professional space for lawyers who want to examine that conflict openly—and work lawfully to change what they believe should be changed.

AAR does not reject the legal profession.

It seeks to expand its possibilities.

AAR does not reject the rule of law.

It insists that the rule of law must itself remain open to principled examination.

II. Professional Competition for the Legal System

AAR is intended to become a competing professional institution—an alternative to exclusive reliance upon the professional culture represented by organizations such as the American Bar Association and Iowa State Bar Association.

Competition is healthy in almost every other field. Different universities advance different intellectual traditions. Different medical associations debate standards of care. Different civic organizations advocate competing philosophies of government.

Why should legal professionals have fewer institutional choices when the questions they confront concern the meaning of justice itself?

The Iowa State Bar Association does not itself license Iowa attorneys, and AAR membership cannot presently substitute for admission to practice by the Iowa Supreme Court. [1] Iowa's court rules—including bar admission, professional conduct, and attorney discipline—are prescribed through the judicial system. [2]

The ABA, however, occupies an unusually influential position in legal education. Its Section of Legal Education describes its Council as the nationally recognized accrediting body for American legal education, and the ABA itself identifies law-school accreditation and model ethics codes among its major roles.

AAR's long-term challenge is therefore not imaginary: it is whether competent, ethical legal education and professional formation must remain dependent upon one dominant institutional pathway.

This Debate is Already Happening

AAR is not alone in questioning whether one accrediting pathway should exercise such overwhelming influence.

In 2026, Federal Trade Commission staff urged the Tennessee Supreme Court to open law-school accreditation to greater competition, expressly criticizing what the agency called the ABA's law-school accreditation monopoly. [3] The FTC argued that excessive reliance on a professional trade association can restrict entry into a profession and increase costs to consumers.

AAR intends to bring that debate to Iowa from a justice-centered perspective.

III. From the English Bar to the American Revolution

Professional Reform Is Not Disloyalty to Law

There is an important precedent in America's own founding.

The American Revolution was not led only by people outside the legal establishment. A remarkable number of the people who challenged British authority were lawyers trained within the very Anglo-British legal tradition they eventually helped transform.

John Dickinson—the “Penman of the Revolution”—studied law at London's Middle Temple before returning to America and becoming one of the most influential constitutional thinkers of the Revolutionary generation. [4]

John Rutledge studied at Middle Temple, was admitted to English practice, returned to South Carolina, became a leader during the Revolution, helped draft the United States Constitution, and later served on the U.S. Supreme Court. [5]

Edward Rutledge also trained at Middle Temple before becoming a lawyer, Continental Congressman, and signer of the Declaration of Independence. [6]

John Laurens returned from studying law at Middle Temple and soon joined George Washington's headquarters as an aide-de-camp during the Revolutionary War. [7]

Middle Temple's own historical records note future American revolutionaries—including John Laurens, Edward Rutledge, John Dickinson, and Thomas Pinckney—dining together in its Hall. [8]

These men did not conclude that learning English law required permanent submission to every institution or doctrine they had inherited from England.

They learned the law—and then participated in changing the legal order itself.

A legal professional does not betray the rule of law by questioning doctrines, institutions, or professional conventions. Sometimes reforming them is the highest expression of fidelity to law.

1877, 1878, and 1890: A Period Worth Reexamining

The timing of several developments in the late nineteenth century deserves historical examination—not because chronology by itself proves conspiracy, coordination, or wrongful intent, but because this was a formative period in the reconstruction of American legal institutions.

Reconstruction effectively ended following the political settlement associated with 1877. [9]

In 1878, seventy-five lawyers from twenty states and the District of Columbia founded the American Bar Association. [10]

In 1890, the Supreme Court decided Hans v. Louisiana, a case that became foundational to the modern doctrine of state sovereign immunity—the principal doctrinal history examined in Unjust Iowa. [11]

These events do not prove one caused another.

They do, however, belong to the same broad period in which Reconstruction collapsed, the legal profession became increasingly organized and professionalized, and doctrines governing the relationship between citizens and governmental power were being reshaped.

On the ABA's Racial/Gender Origins

The ABA was also born from a legal profession far less representative than today's. The ABA itself acknowledges that its historical practice excluded Black lawyers and that the organization formally restricted membership to white men in 1912; its first women members were admitted in 1918. [12]

That history does not establish that today's ABA shares those exclusions. It plainly does not. The modern ABA has undertaken substantial diversity, civil-rights, legal-aid, and public-service work.

But institutional history still matters. Organizations can change profoundly while professional structures created in earlier periods continue shaping who enters a profession, how its norms are transmitted, and which doctrines become conventional wisdom.

AAR and Government Immunity: Who Gets to Question the Doctrine?

Government-immunity doctrines illustrate why the legal profession needs genuinely independent spaces for professional dissent.

Judicial immunity, sovereign immunity, qualified immunity, official-capacity doctrines, procedural defenses, and related rules are routinely taught to new lawyers as components of existing law.

Lawyers must understand existing doctrine. Courts cannot function if advocates simply pretend precedent does not exist.

But understanding a doctrine is not the same as accepting that the doctrine is just, constitutionally sound, or beyond democratic reform.

When a doctrine determines whether citizens injured by government can obtain any judicial remedy at all, the professional institutions that teach, interpret, defend, and reproduce that doctrine should not be treated as the only legitimate forums for deciding whether the doctrine itself deserves reform.

The citizen who alleges unlawful governmental injury has an interest too.

So does the public.

And so do lawyers who believe existing doctrine has departed from constitutional principles.

Unjust Iowa: Third Treatise of Civil Government examines this problem at length, beginning with Hans v. Louisiana and tracing the development of immunity doctrines that I argue conflict with popular sovereignty and meaningful governmental accountability.

That research ultimately produced one of the central reforms in Justice Across Iowa:

Read Reform Five: Abolish Government Immunity Doctrines →

Click the image to view the reform.

And the personal case record that led me to examine these doctrines is documented in:

Article Series: Iowa's Broken Judiciary →

Click the image to read the series.

IV. What the Iowa Rules Themselves Say

The Profession's Own Ideals Are Higher Than Mere Institutional Conformity

Iowa's own Rules of Professional Conduct provide an important starting point.

They describe a lawyer not merely as an advocate for a paying client, but as a public citizen with a special responsibility for the quality of justice. [13] They say lawyers should seek improvement of law, access to the legal system, legal education, and administration of justice.

They also recognize that lawyers encounter genuine conflicts among responsibilities to clients, the legal system, professional livelihood, and their own ethical judgment. [14]

Iowa Rule 32:6.4 expressly permits lawyers to participate in organizations devoted to reforming law or its administration—even where the reform may affect a client's interests, subject to appropriate disclosure requirements. [15]

AAR takes those principles seriously.

If lawyers are public citizens with a special responsibility for justice, then they should have institutions where questioning entrenched legal doctrine is not treated as professional disloyalty, but as part of the profession's highest calling.

The problem AAR addresses is therefore not that Iowa's rules forbid law reform.

The concern is whether the surrounding professional culture, economic incentives, institutional relationships, credentialing structure, and fear of professional isolation can discourage the kind of sustained structural criticism the rules themselves permit—and sometimes encourage.

V. A Different Ethical Commitment

As a member organization of Wild Willpower, AAR voluntarily adopts an additional ethical framework. AAR members are invited to affirm principles including:

— Act with compassion.

— Speak and act honestly.

— Demonstrate integrity.

— Serve justice fairly and without favoritism.

— Exercise independent ethical judgment.

— Accept accountability for their words, decisions, and actions.

— Be transparent where appropriate while avoiding unnecessary harm.

— Respect the dignity, rights, and well-being of others.

— Question unjust laws, doctrines, or institutional practices through lawful and peaceful means.

— Distinguish tradition, authority, and professional consensus from evidence of what is actually just.

— Work in good faith toward the common good.

VI. What AAR Does Not Do

AAR membership does not exempt any lawyer from Iowa law, court rules, licensing requirements, client duties, disciplinary authority, confidentiality, candor, conflicts rules, or any other binding professional obligation.

AAR does not currently grant governmental authority to practice law.

An AAR credential is an independent private professional credential unless and until a competent governmental or judicial authority recognizes it for another purpose.

AAR does not promise immunity from professional discipline.

What AAR does provide is institutional support for lawful professional dissent, public-interest scholarship, legal education, reform advocacy, and the development of alternative professional standards.

VII. Long-Term Goal: Compete in Legal Education and Accreditation

AAR's long-term objective is not merely to comment upon the existing accreditation system.

It intends to become a credible competitor.

AAR will develop rigorous standards for legal education, ethical practice, public service, demonstrated competence, supervised training, and professional accountability.

It will advocate reforms allowing Iowa to recognize additional lawful pathways into legal practice, including independently accredited legal education, supervised apprenticeship, clinical training, competency-based assessment, rigorous examination, or combinations of these methods.

The standard should be competence, ethics, and demonstrated ability—not institutional pedigree alone.

If AAR eventually satisfies the standards necessary for governmental or judicial recognition, it will seek that recognition openly and through lawful processes.