Justice Department says Duke Law School illegally considered race in admissions

DURHAM, N.C. (AP) — The Justice Department on Thursday accused Duke University’s law school of unlawfully considering race in admissions in the latest Trump administration action against higher education institutions.

In a findings letter to the school, the department said that while administrators paid lip service to being race-neutral in admissions, they used other factors as stand-ins for race, including personal essays and whether someone was a first-generation college student.

The Durham, North Carolina, school said in an emailed statement it was reviewing the letter and is committed to following the law “in a manner that is consistent with our academic mission.”

“Duke Law School doesn’t get a free pass to discriminate against white and Asian students simply because it thinks it has good intentions,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division said in a news release. “Using ‘diversity’ essay questions to identify preferred races for admission is still illegal discrimination based on race.”

Affirmative action in college admissions has been illegal since a 2023 Supreme Court ruling. The same ruling said colleges could continue to assess how applicants’ backgrounds might speak to broader characteristics, but President Donald Trump has repeatedly accused colleges of using other proxies to maintain racial diversity, which conservatives view as illegal discrimination.

The department recently found that the medical schools at Yale University and the University of California, Los Angeles, illegally considered race in admissions. It announced in June that it was launching similar investigations into 15 other medical schools.

The Trump administration previously targeted undergraduate admissions at selective colleges, demanding they collect data to show they are complying with the Supreme Court ruling.

In its findings against Duke Law, the DOJ said Black or Hispanic applicants were much more likely to be admitted than white or Asian applicants with the same academic credentials. Further, it said, in 2024 and 2025, the median Law School Admissions Test scores of rejected white and Asian applicants exceeded the median scores of admitted Black applicants.

The department said it was seeking to reach a settlement with Duke Law.