The Justice Department on Thursday accused Duke University's law school of illegally considering race in admissions — the clearest sign yet that elite institutions are still running racial preferences two years after the Supreme Court told them to stop.
This matters because if one of the country's top law schools is caught gaming the system, the question isn't whether Duke is alone. It's how many others are still doing the same thing behind closed doors.
In a findings letter to the Durham, North Carolina, school, the DOJ said Duke Law administrators paid lip service to race-neutral admissions while using personal essays and first-generation college student status as stand-ins for race. The department said Black or Hispanic applicants were much more likely to be admitted than white and Asian applicants with the same academic credentials. In 2024 and 2025, the median LSAT scores of rejected white and Asian applicants exceeded the median scores of admitted Black applicants.
"Duke Law School doesn't get a free pass to discriminate against white and Asian students simply because it thinks it has good intentions," Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon said in a news release. "Using 'diversity' essay questions to identify preferred races for admission is still illegal discrimination based on race."
Duke responded with the kind of carefully lawyered statement that signals nothing. The school said it was reviewing the letter and is committed to following the law "in a manner that is consistent with our academic mission." That phrasing — law and mission — leaves plenty of room for Duke to keep doing what it was doing under a different label.
The Supreme Court banned racial preferences in college admissions in its 2023 ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard. The ruling said schools could still consider how an applicant's background speaks to broader characteristics, but President Trump has repeatedly accused colleges of using that loophole as cover for race-based admissions by another name.
Duke Law is not an isolated case. The DOJ recently found that the medical schools at Yale and UCLA illegally considered race in admissions. In June, the department launched similar investigations into 15 other medical schools. The administration has also pressured selective undergraduate programs to hand over data proving compliance with the Supreme Court ruling.
The department said it is seeking a settlement with Duke Law.
The pattern is clear. The Supreme Court said stop discriminating by race. Elite schools heard: find a new way to discriminate by race. The press, for its part, framed this as just another Trump administration action against higher education — which is technically true but misses the point. The SFGATE and Associated Press coverage, which ran as the same wire story, buried the actual data: rejected white and Asian applicants had higher test scores than admitted Black applicants. That's not a framing dispute. That's the story.
The real question nobody in the press is asking: how many other schools are still quietly doing what Duke was caught doing? The DOJ is working through a list. Americans should expect it's a long one.
