Duke University School of Law had admissions reviewers tag applicant essays with a label called "Diversity/Services." They flagged characteristics correlated with race — things like Pell grant recipient status — and used those tags to sort who got in and who didn't. In 2024 and 2025, the median LSAT scores of rejected white and Asian applicants exceeded the median scores of admitted Black applicants.
The Supreme Court said stop. Duke said "we're committed to complying with the law." Then they kept doing it with a Post-it note over the mechanism.
On August 6, 2026, the Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division dropped its findings letter: Duke Law School intentionally discriminated based on race in its 2023, 2024, and 2025 admissions classes, in direct violation of both Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Supreme Court's 2023 ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard. That's the ruling that was supposed to end race-based admissions in higher education. Supposed to.
Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon didn't leave much room for interpretation. "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. She followed that with the part every university admissions office in the country should tattoo on their wall: "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 method was almost elegant in its cynicism. You can't check a box for race anymore — the Supreme Court took that away. So Duke built a workaround. Tag essays that mention certain backgrounds. Flag applicants with characteristics that happen to correlate with race. Feed those tags into the admissions machine. The output looks race-neutral on paper. The results tell a different story: Black and Hispanic applicants admitted at substantially higher rates than white and Asian applicants with identical academic credentials.
That's not diversity. That's discrimination with extra steps.
A Duke University spokesperson told reporters, "We are reviewing the letter and its conclusions carefully. Duke is committed to complying with the law and will continue to do so in a manner that is consistent with our academic mission." That's the same institution that just got caught running a three-year scheme to circumvent the highest court in the country. "Committed to complying" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence.
The DOJ is now seeking to reach a settlement with Duke Law. If a settlement can't be reached, a lawsuit follows. And this isn't the first time federal investigators have come knocking — a separate federal investigation into Duke Law's law journal selection practices launched last year.
The SFFA v. Harvard decision was a landmark. Chief Justice Roberts wrote that students must be treated as individuals, not as members of racial groups. Three admissions cycles later, Duke Law was still sorting applicants by race — they just used a thesaurus. "Diversity/Services" tags instead of racial checkboxes. Pell grant status as a proxy for skin color. Same machine, different paint job.
What makes this case matter beyond Durham is what it signals to every other law school, medical school, and undergraduate program that quietly rebuilt its race-conscious admissions process using the same kind of workarounds. The DOJ just demonstrated that the SFFA ruling has enforcement behind it. The Supreme Court said the words. Now the Justice Department is showing up with the findings letters.