The legal profession’s gatekeepers engaged in a fierce debate this week after an Arizona law school began accepting applicants who had taken only the more general GRE graduate admissions exam instead of the traditional Law School Admissions Test.

The University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law announced the new test policy in February, opening its doors to a larger pool of applicants. That decision prompted a scolding by the Law School Admissions Council, the nonprofit entity that oversees the law school applications process. The council warned in an April 4 letter that it might expel Arizona’s school from its network, which would send a strong signal to law schools that they need to play by the established rules.

On Wednesday, some 150 law school deans, including Martha Minow from Harvard and Robert Post from Yale, lined up to support Arizona. In a letter to the council’s president, Daniel Bernstine, the deans argued that “experimentation benefits all of us,” and said that kicking out Arizona “is unwarranted under the existing rules and sends a terrible message to law schools about experimentation in the admissions process.”

The council has significant clout in the legal profession because it oversees the administration of the LSAT and the common application process used by tens of thousands of people when they apply to any of the 206 law schools accredited by the American Bar Association.