Editors at National Review Online assess the US Justice Department’s recent action involving Duke University’s law school.
The Supreme Court’s 2023 decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard prohibited race-conscious admissions, but apparently the leadership at Duke University’s law school took that as a challenge to discriminate in less obvious ways.
The Department of Justice announced on Thursday that its investigation concluded Duke’s law school intentionally discriminated to the benefit of black and Hispanic applicants by using racial proxies when admitting the classes since the SFFA decision.
The DOJ’s investigation found damning internal communications and documents that explain how the law school developed mechanisms to identify minority applicants and craft a more racially diverse student body, despite its purportedly race-neutral policies and lack of racial data on applicants. The law school’s staff emphasized “DEI” as “one of [their] most important values” in 2023, while they further committed to “work even harder” towards achieving “a racially diverse class.” After the SFFA ruling, the law school revised its official mission statement so that it emphasized building a “legal profession that embodies a commitment” to values such as equal justice and a “diversity of perspective and experience.” The law school prompted applicants to submit a short essay discussing how they would advance the mission statement; admissions staff had a “Diversity/Services” tag for labeling an applicant’s characteristics that strongly correlated with particular racial backgrounds.
The data are revealing: Black and Hispanic students were admitted with noticeably lower test scores. In 2025, for example, the admitted median LSAT scores for black and Hispanic applicants were 166 and 171, respectively, while the admitted median scores for Asian and white applicants were both 173, out of the maximum 180. The DOJ notes that the median LSAT scores of Asian and white applicants who were rejected in 2024–25 were two points higher than those of black students who were admitted. The DOJ calculated that Duke Law School’s consideration of race gave a “black applicant a roughly 3.5x higher probability of admission than an equally strong Asian applicant with similar academic credentials.”
