Federal investigators say UC Berkeley's law school discriminated against white and Asian applicants for years, using essay prompts and internal identity tracking to tilt admissions decisions by race. The joint findings, released Wednesday, land at a public law school and reignite a fight over how far universities can go to shape a diverse class without violating civil rights law.
According to joint findings released by the U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division and Department of Education, statistical analysis of applicant data showed Black applicants to UC Berkeley Law had 5.8 times higher odds of admission in 2025 compared to white applicants with equivalent credentials. As Bloomberg reports, the U.S. Justice Department said the university discriminated against applicants based on race, and accused Berkeley Law of refusing to comply with requests for information during the investigation.
The disparities extended to standardized test scores. Federal civil rights investigators reported that across the 2024 and 2025 admissions cycles, half of all admitted Black applicants at Berkeley Law scored lower on the LSAT than 95% of admitted white applicants, and 37% scored lower than 99% of admitted white applicants, according to a Justice Department announcement.
How Investigators Say Race Shaped the Classroom
The federal investigation concluded that Berkeley Law collected applicants' racial identities in order to group admitted students by primary identity inside classrooms, a practice federal officials characterized as an intentional effort to separate students by race. Officials also pointed to diversity essay prompts as a mechanism they say was used to favor specific racial groups, per the same Justice Department findings.
Dean Erwin Chemerinsky pushed back hard on the conclusions. He said the law school's admissions policy strictly prohibits considering race in any way and scrupulously complies with federal statutes and state law, according to the Daily Signal. Chemerinsky also pointed to Supreme Court precedent in discussing race and admissions.
A Probe Rooted in a Landmark Supreme Court Case
The federal compliance review involving UC Berkeley's law-school admissions practices is discussed in the Daily Signal's account. The outlet also discusses the Supreme Court's 2023 ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard as legal context. The outlet also raises the question of whether UC Berkeley's federal Department of Education funding could theoretically be put at risk by findings of noncompliance.
Student demographic figures from October 2025 show UC Berkeley Law enrolled 1,128 law students, including 516 white students, 293 Asian students, and 51 Black students, according to a Reuters report. Berkeley Law is a public law school, per the same account.
Part of a Wider Federal Push
The findings against Berkeley Law follow August 2026 federal determinations accusing Duke University School of Law and George Washington University Medical School of using short-answer essay prompts and internal tags as racial proxies to bypass federal non-discrimination laws — a pattern Hoodline previously detailed at GW. As Higher Ed Dive notes, federal civil rights probes have expanded to dozens of higher education institutions nationwide, framing Berkeley as one piece of a broader enforcement strategy.
Just days earlier, on September 3, the U.S. Department of the Treasury and Internal Revenue Service proposed a rule that would revoke federal tax-exempt status for private schools and colleges maintaining race-conscious admissions or support programs, according to the Los Angeles Times. Officials estimated that proposal alone could affect up to 18,000 institutions.
California's Own Ban Predates the Federal Fight
Berkeleyside reports that California's own admissions policies have also drawn scrutiny. Public university officials have maintained that application race data is collected for statistical purposes only, the outlet notes.
This is not the first time Berkeley Law has faced this exact allegation. In September 1992, the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights determined that Berkeley Law's admissions practices violated Title VI after finding the school maintained ethnic waitlists and sorted applicants by race, according to the Los Angeles Times archives. That earlier probe ended with a settlement agreement requiring policy revisions, more than three decades before this week's findings reopened the same question.
Key questions remain unresolved: how planned settlement negotiations will proceed, whether the Justice Department will pursue formal litigation, how federal agencies will draw the line between personal essay context and impermissible racial proxies, and whether federal grant funding or Berkeley's tax status could ultimately be affected.
