On Sept. 9, federal investigators concluded that the University of California, Berkeley School of Law broke the law. Not some obscure regulation buried in an agency handbook. Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the same statute Berkeley’s own professors teach first-year students. The joint finding from the Justice Department and the Department of Education says Berkeley Law discriminated against Asian and white applicants in the entering classes of 2024 and 2025, after the Supreme Court restricted race-conscious admissions.
In 2022, Berkeley Dean Erwin Chemerinsky told the New Yorker that colleges would have to “find ways to achieve diversity that can’t be documented as violating the Constitution.” That’s a law school dean telling colleagues to dodge a ruling without leaving fingerprints.
A quick refresher on constitutional law: In 2023 in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, the Supreme Court ruled that Harvard’s and the University of North Carolina’s race-conscious admissions programs violated the Equal Protection Clause, and by extension Title VI, which bars any federally funded institution from discriminating on the ground of race, color, or national origin. The court left room for schools to weigh how race shaped an applicant’s personal story, but not to use race itself, or a stand-in for it, as a plus factor. Berkeley’s own numbers show which side of that line it landed on.
Berkeley’s Own Numbers
The numbers the Justice Department pulled out of Berkeley’s own files make the point better than any op-ed could. In 2025, after controlling for LSAT scores and undergraduate GPA, black applicants had 5.8 times the odds of admission of similarly qualified white applicants; in 2024 it was 6.5 times. Median admitted LSAT scores those years ran 172 for both Asian and white applicants, versus 164 and then 167 for black applicants. Half the black students admitted scored below the 95th percentile of admitted white students, and more than a third scored below the 99th.
The mechanism, per the findings letter, ran through an application prompt asking how an applicant’s perspective, experience, and voice would contribute to diversity, and Berkeley allegedly sorted admitted students into sections by what it called primary identity. The Justice Department calls that a racial proxy.
Larger Pattern
Berkeley isn’t an outlier; it’s part of a pattern. The Justice Department announced almost identical findings regarding Duke Law in August, covering cycles back to 2023. Medical schools at Yale, UCLA, and UC Davis got there first, and the Justice Department opened 15 more investigations into medical schools’ admissions in June, from Harvard to Johns Hopkins to Stanford. This is standard operating procedure across American legal and medical education, three years after the court spoke.
This should worry you even outside the courtroom or an operating room. For doctors and lawyers, we want the best of the best, not the applicant who checked the preferred box. Announcing the probes, Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division put it plainly: too many top schools are “more concerned about the demographics of their incoming classes” than turning out doctors who can do the job. Swap doctor for lawyer or judge and the stakes barely change. A surgeon operates on your heart; a defense attorney argues for your freedom. Ideology should never outrank merit when the person being trained may one day hold your life, or your liberty, in his hands.
None of this means an applicant’s full story should be off the table. A kid who grew up picking crops alongside his parents, or one who is the first in his family to see a college classroom, brings something a spreadsheet can’t measure. But there’s a real difference between an essay about lived experience and building a prompt and rubric around race as a category, and Berkeley’s own dean drew that line himself.
I’ve spent decades testifying as an expert witness on fiduciary duty, in courtrooms where “I meant well” doesn’t survive first contact with a deposition. A fiduciary owes duties of loyalty and care to those who trusted them with something valuable, and neither duty bends for good intentions. An officer who knowingly violates a governing rule to chase a goal he prefers, then hides the reasoning, doesn’t get to call that a judgment call. He gets named personally in the lawsuit. A law school dean holds something just as valuable in trust: a seat that belongs, by law, to whichever applicant earned it. Reading a controlling ruling, understanding what it requires, and building a paper workaround anyway isn’t an interpretation dispute. It’s a known breach of duty, owed to the taxpayers funding the school’s grants and to every applicant who lost a seat to skin color instead of merit.
What to Expect
What happens to Berkeley now is mostly civil, not criminal. The Justice Department will likely offer a settlement, new admissions rules, reviewer training, an outside monitor, and years of compliance reporting, and sue if Berkeley refuses to comply. Real criminal exposure would require a separate crime, obstruction or false statements to investigators, not the discrimination itself, though the public paper trail makes that a real risk if anyone cleans house now.
The late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia used to say that the Constitution means what it says until it’s lawfully amended, not whatever a committee decides it should mean this semester. Berkeley’s dean understood that fine; he just decided the fix was getting creative with the paperwork instead of complying. In the military, deciding a lawful order is optional can end a career and land you in a court-martial. It shouldn’t take a uniform to know a deliberate breach carries consequences on its own.
The fix isn’t complicated. Tie continued federal funding to addressing a specific, proven finding of intentional discrimination. Hold the administrators who write the playbook personally accountable in any settlement. Require recurring, independent audits at any school caught once, the way a bank that fails an anti-money-laundering exam doesn’t grade its own homework next year. Law schools exist to train the next generation of judges, prosecutors, and general counsels in what the rule of law actually means. Right now, one of the best-known law schools in the country is teaching a masterclass on how to break the rules and hoping nobody reads the syllabus.
