Harvard is spending more than $126 million a year on legal fees and has assembled a team of former Biden and Obama administration lawyers to fight a federal lawsuit demanding proof that the university actually stopped using race in admissions.
Stuart Delery, a Gibson Dunn partner who served as White House Counsel to President Biden from 2022 to 2023 and held a senior Justice Department post under President Obama, stood before a federal judge in Boston on September 24 and asked the court to throw out the government's case. The suit, United States v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, seeks admissions data the government says it needs to verify Harvard's compliance with the Supreme Court's June 2023 ruling barring race-based admissions.
Delery was not the only Democratic-administration veteran at Harvard's table. Seated alongside him were Joshua Levy, a Ropes and Gray lawyer twice nominated by President Biden to serve as U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts, and Jennifer O'Connor, Harvard's vice president and general counsel, who was nominated by President Obama to be general counsel of the Pentagon and previously served as deputy White House counsel in the Obama administration. O'Connor is also a former partner at WilmerHale, the firm that represented Harvard through the original affirmative-action case that ended at the Supreme Court.
Seven outside lawyers from four different firms now appear on Harvard's docket, the Washington Free Beacon reported. The university spent $126,617,412 on legal fees in the fiscal year running from July 2024 through June 2025, more than any other Ivy League school, more than $30 million above Columbia, and more than five times what Yale spent over the same period.
Delery framed the entire lawsuit as a partisan exercise. He told Judge Myong Joun the case amounted to a "targeted ideologically motivated assault on Harvard" and a "campaign to punish Harvard." He called the government's request for admissions records, a spreadsheet that would include grades, interview scores, and legacy status, "incredibly broad" and "extraordinarily intrusive," warning it would expose "highly sensitive information about hundreds of thousands of high school students," including their "mental health struggles."
He also accused the government of skipping the normal enforcement process.
"Rather than engage with Harvard... the government just sued."
Delery told the court the dispute should have been resolved through "an informal process" and "not through the judicial process," adding that "it is the government that has not followed the law."
Jeffrey Morrison, arguing for the United States, pushed back hard. He called Delery's account of the pre-litigation timeline "factually incorrect" and described the government's attempts to negotiate with Harvard before filing suit as "continual."
Morrison also tried to cut through the drama surrounding the data request itself.
"It's a spreadsheet, your honor."
The government, Morrison told the court, was willing to accept the data on an anonymized basis, names replaced by numbers. Harvard's response, in his telling, was simple obstruction: "They just didn't provide any data."
Morrison pointed out that five other institutions had already settled with the government and turned over admissions records. Judge Joun was not entirely persuaded by that comparison. "I don't know how much stock to put into that other institutions have complied," the judge said. Joun also pressed Morrison on timing, suggesting that further negotiation "could have happened before you filed the lawsuit."
The government has already used admissions data from other schools to document what it says are ongoing violations of the Supreme Court's 2023 ruling. Findings from Duke University illustrate the stakes. At Duke's law school, the government found that a black applicant had roughly 3.5 times the probability of admission as an equally strong Asian applicant with similar academic credentials. At Duke's medical school, during the 2024, 2025 admissions cycle, admission rates for black and Hispanic applicants were two or three times higher than those of white or Asian applicants, even though the black and Hispanic applicants, on average, had lower grades and test scores.
Those findings came from exactly the kind of regression analysis the government says it wants to run on Harvard's data. Harvard's refusal to hand over that data is what triggered the lawsuit.
Harvard's current legal team replaced WilmerHale, the firm that defended the university through the original affirmative-action case, Students for Fair Admissions Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College. That representation cost more than $15 million and included a 15-day district court trial. But the relationship between WilmerHale and Harvard went well beyond a standard attorney-client arrangement. William Lee, a WilmerHale partner, served as senior fellow of the Harvard Corporation. Seth Waxman and Jamie Gorelick, also WilmerHale partners, sat on the Harvard Board of Overseers.
WilmerHale also prepped then-Harvard president Claudine Gay and then-Penn president Liz Magill for their December 2023 congressional testimony on campus antisemitism, testimony that drew widespread criticism and preceded both women's departures from their posts.
While Harvard pours nine figures into courtroom resistance, the university made at least one move this week that suggests a different instinct. Harvard Law School announced it had hired Sherif Girgis, an incoming tenured professor previously at Notre Dame, who clerked for Justice Samuel Alito and co-authored the 2012 book What Is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense. Girgis is set to start January 1, 2027.
The hire stands out against a backdrop of legal warfare. Harvard is willing to spend lavishly to keep the federal government from seeing whether its admissions process has actually changed, but it quietly brought aboard a conservative legal scholar whose work runs against the grain of the university's institutional orthodoxy.
Judge Joun has not yet ruled on Harvard's motion to dismiss. No timeline for a decision was reported.
A university that truly eliminated racial preferences in admissions would have no reason to spend $126 million a year keeping anyone from checking.
