DOJ: Duke Law Discriminated Based on Race

Yesterday the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division announced that it had found Duke Law School “intentionally discriminated based on race” in admissions between 2023 and 2025. Here’s a bit of the press release:

Duke Law’s discriminatory conduct violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin, and the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2023 decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (SFFA), which banned race discrimination in higher education.

“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 of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. “Using ‘diversity’ essay questions to identify preferred races for admission is still illegal discrimination based on race, and this Department is committed to eliminating it everywhere we find it, including in our nation’s law schools.”

The Department’s investigation found that post-SFFA, Duke Law emphasized racial diversity in admissions and engaged in a deliberate effort to preserve race-based outcomes for its incoming classes.

The press release is a bit like an executive summary of the findings, but the details are contained in a letter which Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, head of the department’s Civil Rights Division, sent to Duke’s lawyers. The letter is several pages long but it’s worth walking through some of it. First, here’s how they did it despite the Supreme Court’s decision in SFFA v. Harvard (issued in June 2023).

Reviewer templates instruct tagging short-answer content (including “Diversity/Services”) to assess how candidates may “further [Duke Law’s] mission,” and explicitly direct contextualization of weaker academic records using background factors such as first-generation status. Duke Law’s published policies assert that reviewers do not see racial demographic data and that the school “will not analyze or monitor the racial or ethnic composition” during decision-making; yet the structure of prompts and review tags elevates personal background variables commonly correlated with race (first-generation, Pell, etc.). Duke Law states that it values “students with a wide range of experiences, backgrounds, and interests that may not be directly related to their legal ambitions” and encourages applicants to “highlight different elements” of themselves “so that we get a full picture of who you are.” The record shows those variables were used to advance racial diversity goals and thereby operated as material race-related proxies in admissions outcomes.

Internal communications in late 2023 reveal that Duke Law emphasized that “DEI” “is one of our most important values,” pledged to “work even harder” to admit and recruit “a racially diverse class,” and later refined public language to avoid implying diminished effort if racial diversity declined.

There is also statistical evidence that shows minority students were given a significant advantage in applications. [Emphasis added]

…in 2025, the admitted median for black and Hispanic applicants was 166 (88.7th) and 171 (96.2nd) respectively, while the admitted median for Asian students was 173 (97.9th) and the admitted median for white applicants was 173 (97.9th). Notably, median LSATs of denied Asian and white applicants (Asian: 168, 169; white: 167, 168) in 2024-2025 exceeded the median LSATs of admitted black applicants (164, 166).

For those, like me, who never went to law school the LSAT is a test with a minimum score of 120 and a maximum score of 180. Nationwide, the median score is 152. That means a score of 166 (the median score for accepted black applicants) puts you somewhere around the 89th percentile, which is very good obviously. But a score of 168 (the median for rejected white and Asian applicants) is closer to the 92nd percentile. And the accepted median score for Asian and white students was 173, which is 98th percentile.

In short, accepted white and Asian applicants had median scores in the top 2 percent of all test takers while black applicants were accepted with median scores in the top 11 percent. As a result, the DOJ finds Duke Law “deliberately discriminated on the basis of race in its decisions to admit and deny applicants.”

Finally, I can’t help but notice the NY Times published a story about this yesterday which, typically, downplays the findings. Here’s what the Times has to say about the statistics of who was accepted and rejected.

Ms. Dhillon pointed to a Justice Department analysis of Duke data that she said suggested that Black or Hispanic applicants were much more likely to be offered admission than white or Asian students with similar academic records.

And that’s it. Author Alan Blinder has reduced the statistical analysis in the letter to a claim or a suggestion. The bit I highlighted above showing that rejected Asian and white applicants had higher LSAT scores than accepted black applicants isn’t mentioned at all. Frankly, Duke University’s student newspaper did a much better job.

The Department also broke down standardized testing scores, principally the LSAT, for admitted students by race in its review to claim that Duke discriminated against white and Asian students. 

Based on its own analysis, the Department found that the admitted median LSAT for Black applicants in 2024 was 164 and 170 for Hispanic applicants, while the admitted LSAT for Asian applicants was 173 and 172 for white applicants. The Department also found that denied Asian and white applicants held higher LSAT scores on average than admitted Black applicants.

“As a result, a Black or Hispanic applicant has a substantially higher likelihood of admission to Duke Law than a white or Asian applicant with the same academic credentials,” the Department said in the release.

This is the core of the argument and a junior and senior at Duke have done a better job of summarizing it than the national education correspondent for The New York Times. I wonder why?

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