By Karen Sloan

May 22 (Reuters) - Washington state in September will start allowing graduates of law schools that are not accredited by the American Bar Association to sit for its bar exam—provided they would be eligible to sit for the attorney licensing exam in another state.

The change, approved by the Washington State Bar Association’s Board of Governors in early May, makes Washington the fourth state in recent months to eliminate or relax its reliance on the ABA’s national system of law school accreditation.

Since January, Republican-controlled state supreme courts in Texas, Florida, and Alabama have either cut out the ABA from their attorney licensing process altogether or said they will begin recognizing other law schools alongside ABA-accredited ones.

The ABA accreditation role has also been under fire from President Donald Trump's administration over its diversity and inclusion requirement for law schools, which the ABA voted to eliminate earlier this month.

Washington's recent change resulted from a years-long review of regulatory rules focused on expanding access to legal services and is not an attempt to "denigrate the ABA accreditation process," a state bar spokesperson said in a statement.

"We are honoring the ABA accreditation process while eliminating unnecessary barriers to the legal profession," the state bar said.

The new bar exam eligibility standard in Washington will have the greatest effect for graduates of state-accredited law schools in California, the largest among the handful of states that now recognize non-ABA accredited law schools.

Jenn Rosato Perea, the ABA’s managing director of accreditation and legal education, said Washington’s change does not “substantively affect the current national accreditation system.”

Opponents of states dropping their ABA accreditation requirements have said a national patchwork of lawyer admission rules will hurt law graduates and impede their ability to move between states. Perea said Washington’s recent change to bar exam eligibility won’t impact the portability of law degrees.

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