DOJ Accuses UCLA Law School of Discrimination in Admissions

The latest findings from the Trump administration’s investigation into graduate school admissions processes are in: The Department of Justice announced Thursday that the University of California, Los Angeles, School of Law discriminated against white and Asian applicants over the course of three years. In a news release, the DOJ wrote that UCLA’s admission practices violated the 2023 Supreme Court ruling that banned the consideration of race in admissions.

UCLA Law’s application included essay questions and personal statement prompts that were “designed to elicit information about race” and encouraged applicants to disclose their race, according to the release. DOJ accused UCLA Law of rejecting white and Asian applicants who had the same exam scores as Black and Hispanic applicants who got in. The 2023 Supreme Court opinion doesn’t prohibit “universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise,” according to Chief Justice John Roberts.

“Like many of its peer institutions, UCLA Law School runs a two-tiered admissions system whose academic bar for acceptance shifts up or down depending on the color of your skin,” Harmeet K. Dhillon, the assistant attorney general overseeing DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, said in a statement. “The use of race as a thumb on the scale that helps or disadvantages any student is illegal. The Department will continue to enforce equal treatment under the law everywhere including in our nation’s law schools.”

The DOJ previously announced it found racial discrimination in law school admissions at Duke University and the University of California, Berkeley, and several top-ranked medical schools. Other, similar investigations are still underway, and experts have criticized some of the agency’s probes and letters outlining its findings as lacking.