The Justice Department accused Duke University's law school of discriminating against white and Asian applicants by using essay prompts and other proxies to sort students by race, two years after the Supreme Court outlawed affirmative action in admissions.
The DOJ issued a findings letter to Duke Law School in Durham, North Carolina, on Thursday, alleging the school gave Black and Hispanic applicants far better odds of admission than white or Asian applicants who carried the same academic credentials. The department said it is now seeking a settlement to bring the school into compliance with federal civil rights law.
Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon, who leads the DOJ's Civil Rights Division, framed the case as a straightforward violation of the law, not a close call.
"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 added that using "diversity" essay questions to identify applicants by race "is still illegal discrimination based on race, and this Department is committed to eliminating it everywhere we find it."
The DOJ's findings paint a picture of a law school that publicly claimed race-neutral admissions while operating a system that produced large racial disparities. Administrators "paid lip service to being race-neutral in admissions" while relying on other factors as stand-ins for race, including personal essays and first-generation college student status, the department said.
In 2024 and 2025, the median LSAT scores of rejected white and Asian applicants exceeded the median scores of admitted Black applicants. Fox News reported that Black applicants to Duke Law in 2025 had roughly 3.5 times the chance of admission as Asian applicants with the same academic credentials.
That gap is not subtle. A white or Asian applicant who scored higher on the LSAT than the median admitted Black student could still be rejected, while a Black applicant with a lower score got in. The DOJ described the pattern as intentional, not accidental.
The Washington Examiner reported that the DOJ found Duke Law intentionally discriminated based on race in admissions for the classes of 2023, 2024, and 2025, meaning the practice continued even after the Supreme Court's 2023 ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard made affirmative action in college admissions illegal. The department cited violations of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the landmark federal statute that bars racial discrimination in programs receiving federal funding.
The Supreme Court's 2023 decision did leave one narrow opening. The justices said colleges could still assess how an applicant's background might speak to broader characteristics, a concession that many critics warned would become a loophole.
Duke Law appears to have driven a truck through it. Fox News reported that the school's post-ruling guidance allowed admissions officials to consider applicants' discussions of how race affected their lives and to "tag" certain essays to provide context for weaker academic records. The DOJ concluded that these essay prompts functioned as a racial sorting mechanism, a way to identify Black and Hispanic applicants and give them preferential treatment without formally checking a race box.
That is exactly the kind of proxy system the Trump administration has warned schools against. President Trump has repeatedly accused colleges of using workarounds to maintain racial diversity quotas after the Supreme Court ruling, and his DOJ has made enforcement a priority.
Duke Law School responded with a brief emailed statement that stopped well short of contesting the DOJ's factual findings. A university spokesperson said the school is "reviewing the letter and its conclusions carefully" and that Duke "is committed to complying with the law and will continue to do so in a manner that is consistent with our academic mission."
That is a carefully lawyered non-denial. The school did not dispute the LSAT data. It did not deny using diversity essays as a screening tool. It did not challenge the DOJ's core allegation that Black and Hispanic applicants received preferential treatment. It said it would follow the law, which is precisely what the DOJ says it has not been doing.
Duke Law is not the first elite institution to face this accusation, and it will not be the last. The DOJ recently found that medical schools at Yale University and the University of California, Los Angeles also illegally considered race in admissions. In June, the department announced investigations into 15 additional medical schools over alleged race-based discrimination.
The Trump administration has also targeted undergraduate admissions at selective colleges, demanding they collect data to demonstrate compliance with the Supreme Court's ruling. The scope of the enforcement campaign signals that the DOJ views the problem as systemic, not isolated.
And outside groups have noticed the same patterns. National Review reported that Students for Fair Admissions, the organization that won the landmark 2023 Supreme Court case, sent warning letters to Duke, Yale, and Princeton citing suspicious admissions data. SFFA's letter to Duke noted that the Class of 2028, the first class admitted after the ruling, showed a six-percentage-point decrease in Asian American students compared to the Class of 2027, when racial preferences were still openly used.
SFFA wrote directly to the university:
"Your college just reported its admissions data for the Class of 2028, the first class admitted after [the Supreme Court's ruling]. Compared to the Class of 2027 (when you explicitly gave racial preferences to African Americans and Hispanics), you now have fewer Asian Americans."
A Martin Center analysis cited by National Review found no legitimate explanations for the apparent continued violations at these schools. The data, in other words, looks like what you would expect if schools simply relabeled the same race-conscious admissions practices and kept going.
For now, the DOJ is pursuing a voluntary resolution agreement with Duke Law rather than immediate litigation. Breitbart reported that the department is seeking a settlement as part of the broader Trump administration crackdown on race-conscious admissions practices that persist after the Supreme Court's ruling.
Several questions remain unanswered. The DOJ has not publicly detailed the exact LSAT score differentials between rejected white and Asian applicants and admitted Black applicants, nor has it released the specific essay prompts it considers racial proxies. The precise terms the department is seeking in any settlement are also unclear. And Duke has not said whether it will contest the findings or negotiate.
But the direction of travel is plain. The Supreme Court ruled. Elite schools ignored the ruling. And the DOJ is now showing up with data that makes the evasion difficult to deny.
When institutions treat a Supreme Court decision as a suggestion, enforcement is not overreach, it is the bare minimum required to make the law mean what it says.
