Students walk on Duke University’s campus.
Duke University file photo
The Department of Justice (DOJ) announced today that it found Duke University “intentionally discriminated based on race in granting and denying admission” to its law school over three admissions cycles.
It’s the first law school that the department has found to have violated the Supreme Court’s 2023 ban on considering race in college admissions decisions. Up to this point, the DOJ has focused its efforts on proving medical schools discriminated against white and Asian students in their admissions processes, opening investigations into at least 26 schools and announcing findings of discrimination in four.
In its six-page letter to Duke, the department cites internal documents that describe the law school’s commitment to diversity as evidence that the law school’s admissions team intended to discriminate based on race, such as a clause in the mission statement that says the law school aims to “to help build and sustain a dynamic legal profession that embodies commitment to … diversity of perspective and experience (emphasis the DOJ’s).”
The Supreme Court ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard specifically stated that it is not illegal for colleges and universities to continue to pursue racial diversity among their student body—they just couldn’t do it by considering race as a factor in an admissions decision.
The DOJ also used as evidence against Duke Law guidance for application reviewers that they “may consider applicant’s discussions of how race affected their life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise.”
Duke’s language, however, mirrors Justice John Roberts’s majority opinion in the SFFA case: “All parties agree, nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise.”
The letter also includes a section on statistical evidence of discrimination, saying that the median LSAT scores for admitted Black and Hispanic students were lower (in the 84.2nd and 95.1st percentiles, respectively) than the scores of the white (97.1st) and Asian (97.9th) applicants in 2024. The DOJ argues that the median score for Black admitted students was lower than the median score for Asian and white students who were rejected from Duke Law.
The DOJ also argues that a review of applicant-level data from 2025 shows that a Black applicant was about 3.5 times as likely to be admitted compared to an Asian applicant with similar statistics.
The letter is similar to those the DOJ sent to medical schools that the department found had discriminated against white and Asian applicants. Experts have told Inside Higher Ed that statistical analyses of standardized tests are not enough to support a finding of discrimination; they’ve also criticized the letters for lacking standard evidence, such as interviews with admissions professionals.
