The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division said Duke University School of Law intentionally discriminated on the basis of race in admitting students to its 2023, 2024 and 2025 incoming classes, announcing investigative findings that the school violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard.
The finding is among the department’s most direct applications yet of the SFFA ruling, which barred race-conscious admissions in higher education, to a law school, and it sets up either a negotiated settlement or litigation.
Investigators concluded that Duke Law continued to emphasize racial diversity after the ruling and made a deliberate effort to preserve race-based outcomes, according to the department. The school revised its mission statement to include a commitment to a “diversity of perspective and experience,” and its application asked short-answer essay questions inviting candidates to describe how they would advance that mission.
Admissions reviewers were instructed to “tag” the responses, using a “Diversity/Services” designation to capture answers tied to that language, the department said. Reviewers were also directed to tag characteristics the department described as commonly correlated with race, such as Pell Grant status. While Duke Law’s published policies state that reviewers did not see racial demographic data, the department said the tagging system directed staff to flag information that could be used to advance the school’s diversity goals.
The department said the practice produced a substantially higher likelihood of admission for Black and Hispanic applicants than for white and Asian applicants with comparable academic credentials. In 2024 and 2025, it said, the median LSAT scores of rejected white and Asian applicants exceeded the median LSAT scores of admitted Black applicants.
Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon said in a statement that Duke Law “doesn’t get a free pass to discriminate against white and Asian students simply because it thinks it has good intentions,” adding that using “diversity” essay questions to identify preferred races “is still illegal discrimination.”
Law schools receiving federal financial assistance are subject to federal nondiscrimination law. The department said it would pursue settlement negotiations to bring the school’s admissions practices into compliance and would file suit if those talks fail.