The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division announced on Thursday that an investigation into Duke University School of Law found a deliberate attempt to exclude white and Asian students from admittance in violation of the Civil Rights Act.
At Duke Law, REJECTED white & Asian applicants had higher LSATs than admitted black applicants. With similar credentials: black applicants have a 3.5x higher chance of admission than Asians. This isn’t a coincidence—Duke Law discriminates & the @CivilRights Division will end it!…
— AAGHarmeetDhillon (@AAGDhillon) August 6, 2026
The Justice Department’s probe discovered that, despite a 2023 Supreme Court ruling preventing affirmative action in school admittances, “Duke Law emphasized racial diversity in admissions and engaged in a deliberate effort to preserve race-based outcomes for its incoming classes.”
The investigation further discovered that applicants were instructed to provide short answers to questions in hopes of providing a “diversity of perspective and experience.” Reviewers were then instructed to “tag” responses that fit Duke’s progressive agenda with labels like “Diversity/Services” or similar tags to denote characteristics correlated to an applicant’s race, allowing admissions staff to fulfill the school’s desires to enact a racial quota.
The probe concluded that black or hispanic applicants had “a substantially higher likelihood of admission” to Duke’s law school as compared to white or Asian applicants with a similar academic background. It further found that the median LSAT scores of white or Asian applicants who were rejected exceeded the median scores of blacks or hispanics who were admitted into Duke Law.
Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division claims that black applicants had a 3.5 times higher chance of receiving admission over Asian students.
“Duke Law School doesn’t get a free pass to discriminate against white and Asian students simply because it thinks it has good intentions,” Dhillon said in a press release. “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 Justice Department has said that, in cases where racial discrimination is discovered, that settlement negotiations will be opened with the violating party. Should negotiations fail, the Justice Department will file lawsuits.