DOJ Finds Duke Law School Discriminated by Race — and Says It’s the First Law School to Cross the Line
- 3 admissions cycles DOJ found unlawfully discriminatory — Duke Law's 2023, 2024, and 2025 incoming classes — DOJ Civil Rights Division, Aug. 6, 2026
- 3.5x the admission probability DOJ says Black applicants in the 2025 cycle had over Asian applicants with comparable academic credentials — DOJ letter of findings
- 1st law school DOJ has found in violation of the Supreme Court's SFFA v. Harvard ruling — Inside Higher Ed, Aug. 7, 2026
- 16 months DOJ's Civil Rights Division investigated Duke Law's admissions practices before issuing findings — DOJ, opened April 2025
On Thursday, the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division issued a letter of findings concluding that Duke University School of Law “intentionally discriminated based on race” in admitting its 2023, 2024, and 2025 incoming classes, in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Supreme Court's June 2023 ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which also covered UNC and banned race-conscious admissions at colleges and universities nationwide.
Per Inside Higher Ed, Duke is the first law school DOJ has found in violation of the SFFA precedent since that ruling came down three years ago. The finding caps a 16-month investigation that opened in April 2025 and lands amid a broader pattern of federal scrutiny at Duke that now spans its law school, its law journal, and its medical school.
What follows treats DOJ's findings as exactly that — findings, not a court verdict — alongside Duke's own brief public response and a fair methodological counterpoint from outside admissions-law experts on what statistical disparities alone can and cannot prove.
Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon (Trump administration), who leads DOJ's Civil Rights Division, framed the finding as a direct test of whether SFFA actually changed admissions behavior rather than just admissions rhetoric. “Duke Law School doesn’t get a free pass to discriminate against white and Asian students simply because it thinks it has good intentions,” Dhillon said in the department's Aug. 6 release.
The legal theory is narrow but consequential: Title VI bars race discrimination by any institution receiving federal funds, and SFFA v. Harvard held that using race as a factor in admissions decisions — including indirectly, through proxies designed to identify an applicant's race — violates that bar. DOJ's letter argues Duke Law kept doing exactly that after 2023, just with new language layered on top.
According to DOJ, Duke's admissions office publicly described its process as race-neutral in the wake of SFFA while continuing to sort applicants by race through proxies: “diversity/service” tags applied to essays that discussed race or identity, first-generation college status, and Pell Grant recipient status, layered on top of a revised admissions mission statement that DOJ says still emphasized racial diversity goals. The department characterized the combination as “a deliberate effort to preserve race-based outcomes” under a race-neutral surface. “Using ‘diversity’ essay questions to identify preferred races for admission is still illegal discrimination based on race, and this Department is committed to eliminating it everywhere we find it, including in our nation's law schools,” Dhillon said.
DOJ backed the claim with numbers: in the 2025 admissions cycle, Black applicants had roughly 3.5 times the admission probability of Asian applicants with comparable academic credentials. And in both the 2024 and 2025 cycles, the department found that the median LSAT scores of rejected white and Asian applicants exceeded the median LSAT scores of admitted Black applicants — a gap DOJ says is inconsistent with a genuinely race-blind process.
Duke has not publicly disputed DOJ's specifics or its statistics. The university's response, repeated near-verbatim to multiple outlets, was brief: “Today, the Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division issued a letter of findings related to Duke Law's admissions practices. We are reviewing the letter and its conclusions carefully. Duke is committed to complying with the law and will continue to do so in a manner that is consistent with our academic mission.” Dean Kerry Abrams has not issued a separate on-record statement.
A fair accounting of this story includes the methodological pushback DOJ's approach has drawn. Outside admissions-law experts told Inside Higher Ed that raw statistical and LSAT disparities, on their own, are not sufficient to prove intentional discrimination without additional evidence — internal admissions-committee communications, interviews with staff, or documentation showing how the disputed tags were actually applied case by case. DOJ's letter asserts those tags functioned as a deliberate proxy system; that assertion, not yet tested in court, is the crux of whatever comes next.
Duke Law's admissions findings did not arrive in isolation. In July 2025, the Education Department under Secretary Linda McMahon (Trump administration) opened a separate investigation into the Duke Law Journal's race-based member-selection process. Around the same time, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (Trump administration) joined McMahon in a letter to Duke's medical school and health system over race in hiring, admissions, and scholarships — a track connected, per Inside Higher Ed, to a reported $108 million freeze in federal grants and contracts at Duke's medical school. In 2026, Duke also ended its partnership with the PhD Project amid a broader federal sweep of DEI practices across 31 universities.
For the law school specifically, DOJ says it will pursue a negotiated settlement to bring Duke into compliance with Title VI; if those talks fail, the department says it is prepared to sue. No funding cutoff has been announced against Duke Law School itself — that is distinct from the separate $108 million freeze already reported at the medical school. But Jesse Rothstein, a UC Berkeley professor and admissions researcher, told WUNC that federal financial-aid eligibility is the leverage that ultimately matters if a settlement can't be reached.
Reaction outside Duke has split along familiar lines. Kenny Xu, a conservative activist and former spokesperson for Students for Fair Admissions, backed aggressive enforcement of the SFFA precedent. Shruti Parikh, director of NC Asian Americans Together, pushed back on the framing itself, objecting to Asian American applicants being used as a “wedge” in the broader political fight over race-conscious admissions.
“The threat that underlies the investigation is that the government will find the school is in violation of the Civil Rights Act and will cut off its access to federal financial aid, which could be hugely damaging to a university.”
Jesse Rothstein, UC Berkeley, to WUNC
DOJ says Duke Law School kept sorting applicants by race for three admissions cycles after the Supreme Court banned it — using essay tags and applicant-status flags as stand-ins for race rather than dropping race-conscious admissions outright. Duke has not disputed the underlying statistics, only said it is reviewing the letter. Outside experts caution that numbers alone don't prove intent, which is exactly the fight a settlement or lawsuit would resolve. Either way, Duke is now the first law school DOJ has found on the wrong side of SFFA v. Harvard— and one of several fronts, alongside its law journal and medical school, where the university is under active federal review.
