"Now, with the recession exacerbating the impact of such debt on recent graduates and exponentially increasing unmet legal needs of the lower and middle classes, the need to advocate for relief of both pressing issues is paramount," reads the report in support of 106B. "Passage of this resolution would help the ABA advocate for the legal profession's long-standing issues: helping law students and young lawyers with mounting student debt and increasing access to justice for all."

Chris Jennison, an officer in the Young Lawyers Division who helped draft the resolution, said Tuesday that the resolution is the first in what the division hopes to be a sustained, yearslong efforts to reduce the loan burden early career lawyers face and make a law degree more affordable. The division has submitted a second, related resolution that calls for the ABA to push Congress to amend the U.S. Bankruptcy Code to allow for student loans to be discharged without the borrower having to prove that repayment is an "undue hardship"—a standard that has made it historically very difficult for borrowers facing financial troubles to have their government-issued loans wiped clean through the bankruptcy process.

But the sponsors of the loan discharge resolution plan to withdraw it before it heads to the House of Delegates for a vote in order to give the Young Lawyers and Law Student divisions more time to build support for it, Jennison said. Division President Christopher Brown said the group hopes to reintroduce the loan discharge resolution during the ABA's annual meeting in August.

The U.S. Department of Education's most recent national average debt figure for law graduates was $145,500, from 2016. (The Education Department is due to release an updated figure based on 2020 figures soon.) Among respondents to the 2020 ABA survey of lawyers in their first decade of practice, more than 75% owed $100,000 or more at graduation; more than half owed at least $150,000; and a quarter owned more than $200,000. In addition to influencing major life decisions such as home ownership and marriage, loan debt also plays a role in the career paths of young attorneys. More than a third of survey respondents said their debt prompted them to take a job that paid more over one that they preferred.

"The No. 1 issue for young lawyers across the country, including [Young Lawyers Division] members, is student loan debt," Brown said. "We should not be telling young Americans that taking out six-figures of student loan debt is a prerequisite to become a lawyer. One of the big things we've been trying to do is raise awareness of how pervasive the student debt problem is."

The report accompanying resolution 106B notes a 2003 ABA report raising the alarm that many law students hoping to go into public interest work were borrowing upward of $80,000 to fund their legal educations. The subsequent 18 years have brought no shortage of hand-wringing over debt but few real solutions, it says, though the ABA did enthusiastically support Public Service Loan Forgiveness—legislation passed in 2007 under which people who work in qualifying public service positions may have their federal loans discharged after 10 years.

"Since that 2003 report, dozens of commissions, committees, and taskforces across different organizations, including this one, have set out to study issues of law school cost and debt," reads the 106B resolution report. "There are countless surveys, reports, proposals, white papers, political platforms, and recommendations proposing solutions to the student loan debt crisis. Yet, more than 15 years after that report, current law students are still in crippling debt—and it has only gotten worse."

In addition to the ability to convert private loans to government ones, to refinance at lower rates and have debt forgiven, the resolution proposes that the ABA lobby the federal government to make funds available to assist individual borrowers repay their student loans and make it easier for borrowers to qualify for income-based repayment plans. Those plans cap monthly student loan payments based on the borrower's income, and qualified borrowers may have the remainder of their loans forgiven after making payments for a set number of years.