Three years ago, in Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College (SFFA), the Supreme Court told American universities that the Constitution forbids race-based discrimination in admissions. Yet last week, a Justice Department letter suggests that administrators at Duke Law School reacted to the decision by going out of their way to evade it.
Duke Law is the latest institution to be exposed for defying the Supreme Court’s ruling. And while it is private, Duke Law—like Harvard—is subject to Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as a recipient of federal funds. Harvard itself set the pattern of resistance: In February of this year, the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department had to sue the university just to pry loose admissions data for its compliance review, after, in the lawsuit’s words, Harvard “thwarted the Department’s efforts to investigate potential discrimination” at every turn. Less than three weeks before issuing the Duke letter, the Civil Rights Division issued a findings letter against UC San Diego’s medical school, which Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon said built a “shadow application process” that “unlawfully judged applicants for admission based on their race” rather than MCAT scores or GPA.
The letter to Duke Law, which is addressed to its counsel and signed by Dhillon, recounted the Civil Rights Division’s review of the law school’s internal communications and policy documents spanning the 2023, 2024, and 2025 admissions cycles. It found a school that kept close, ongoing track of the racial composition of its incoming classes despite publicly insisting it had moved to race-neutral criteria. As far back as 2022, planning documents touted an incoming class that would be “43% students of color,” up from a four-year average of 34%. Internal emails from late 2023—months after SFFA came down—reveal Duke Law’s leadership reiterating that “DEI” remained “one of our most important values” and pledging to “work even harder” to recruit “a racially diverse class.” One admissions dean, William Hoye, was candid enough to worry, in writing, that people might notice. He told a colleague he would “prefer not to say that we will have to work harder to enroll a diverse class,” because he didn’t want anyone to conclude the office “didn’t work harder if/when the class is not as diverse as we would like.”
The same dean wrote in 2024 about the “broad diversity” of the fall 2023 entering class, which included “27 Latin[o] students, 23 [b]lack students, and 67 Asian/Asian American students”—not the kind of counting to be expected from an office that had actually stopped sorting by race—even as the same memo pledged to keep “developing effective race-neutral admissions policies.” A year later, the dean was calling those policies a success, while (according to Dhillon’s summary) “suggest[ing] that casually assessing the student body during campus visits can help audit student body diversity without collecting formal statistics.” Dhillon concluded the evidence “support[s] the inference that Duke Law intended to influence admissions with race or closely related proxies despite formal disclaimers of race-based decision-making.”
Then there is the testing data: In 2024, median LSAT scores for admitted students ranged from 164 (84.2nd percentile) for black applicants and 170 (95.1st) for Hispanic applicants up to 172 (97.1st) for white applicants and 173 (97.9th) for Asian applicants. In 2025, the LSAT medians for admitted black and Hispanic applicants were respectively at 166 (88.7th) and 171 (96.2nd), while admitted white and Asian applicants both scored a median of 173 (97.9th). Dhillon added that “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).”
After SFFA, admissions officers know they can’t ask “what is your race” on an application, so Duke Law’s own post-ruling guidance told reviewers they “may consider applicants’ discussion of how race affected their life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise,” and reviewer templates tagged responses for how well they served the school’s diversity-minded mission. Even if the school claimed it “will not analyze or monitor the racial or ethnic composition” of applicants during the admissions process, “the structure of prompts and review tags elevates personal background variables commonly correlated with race (first-generation, Pell, etc.).” Dhillon’s letter describes how the school used such “race-related proxies”—in other words, workarounds for the very practices the Supreme Court had struck down.
A Duke spokesman said in response to the letter that the school “is committed to complying with the law and will continue to do so in a manner that is consistent with our academic mission.” This is an all too typical response from institutions caught in a pattern of misconduct—and consider Duke’s history. Remember how, two decades ago, Duke’s faculty and administration got due process backwards—presuming its falsely accused lacrosse players guilty and hanging them out to dry before the case against them collapsed entirely.
The Biden administration was hostile to SFFA, so federal law enforcement is only recently catching up on the question of compliance. Duke Law clearly needs the Justice Department to hold its feet to the fire if it is going to comply with the law. And given the predominant ethos in American universities, it is obvious that Duke Law is not the last school to be caught in a pattern of defiance. The question is only how many others remain.