The Justice Department said Thursday that Duke University’s law school is still using racial preferences in admissions, three years after the Supreme Court ruled the practice illegal.
The department’s Civil Rights Division found that Black and Hispanic applicants received an advantage over White and Asian applicants at Duke Law. In both 2024 and 2025, the median LSAT scores of rejected White and Asian applicants were higher than the median scores of Black students who were admitted.
“Duke Law School doesn’t get a free pass to discriminate against White and Asian students simply because it thinks it has good intentions,” said Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon, who leads the Civil Rights Division. “Using ‘diversity’ essay questions to identify preferred races for admission is still illegal discrimination based on race.”
Duke has said its admissions officers do not see applicants’ racial data directly. DOJ said that’s beside the point. According to the department, the school instructed officers to look for other cues in applications, including essay responses, that could be used to identify and boost Black and Hispanic candidates.
“Duke Law’s internal documents, including policies, and communications confirm the department’s findings that Duke Law intended to discriminate against all racial groups except Black and Hispanic applicants, to accept more Black and Hispanic applicants,” Dhillon wrote in a letter to the school. “As a result of these practices, highly qualified White, Asian, and other students were denied admission on the basis of their race.”
The department said it’s seeking a voluntary agreement with Duke to end the practice.
The finding comes three years after the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which held that explicit racial preferences in college admissions are illegal. Public schools that use racial preferences violate the Constitution under that ruling, and private schools that take federal money and use racial preferences violate Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.
The justices left room for schools to consider how race shaped an individual applicant’s personal experience, but they said schools cannot automatically favor an application from a preferred racial group over another. Chief Justice John G. Roberts specifically warned in his opinion that essay questions cannot be used as a workaround to smuggle race back into the process.
DOJ’s letter alleges Duke’s admissions practices test that exact line, saying the school urged officers to “contextualize” weaker candidates based on their backgrounds in ways that tracked race.
Duke has not issued a public response to the department’s findings. The Washington Times reported it had reached out to the law school for comment.
The action against Duke follows a string of similar investigations DOJ has opened this year into admissions practices at other universities, including Yale and multiple medical schools, as part of a broader push by the Civil Rights Division to enforce the 2023 ruling against schools it says are still using race as a proxy in admissions decisions.
