Trump’s DOJ is on the move. And they are moving quicker than expected.
Because the DOJ is dismantling this woke institution for one breathtaking reason.
For years, elite law schools have insisted, with a straight face, that they’ve fully complied with the Supreme Court’s 2023 ban on race-conscious college admissions. This week, the Trump administration’s Justice Department blew that claim apart when it comes to one of the country’s most prestigious public law schools, releasing findings that the University of California, Berkeley School of Law intentionally and systematically discriminated against Asian and white applicants during its 2024 and 2025 admissions cycles.
The joint investigation, conducted by the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division alongside the U.S. Department of Education, concluded in no uncertain terms that Berkeley Law’s admissions practices violate Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and directly defy the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which explicitly banned the use of race as a factor in university admissions decisions nationwide.
Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, who heads the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, didn’t hold back in describing the scope of Berkeley Law’s alleged misconduct. “Berkeley Law School’s deliberate efforts to circumvent the Supreme Court’s decision in SFFA demonstrate a complete disregard for the rule of law,” Dhillon said. “The department will continue to aggressively pursue compliance from schools who attempt to racially manipulate their student bodies in violation of federal law.”
The numbers behind this finding are genuinely staggering. According to the DOJ’s statistical analysis of Berkeley Law’s own admissions data, black applicants in the 2025 admissions cycle had 5.8 times the odds of admission compared to white applicants with similar qualifications. The disparity was even more pronounced the year before — in 2024, black applicants had a full 6.5 times the odds of admission compared to comparable white applicants. Those aren’t marginal statistical blips that could be explained away by other factors. Those are the kind of numbers that only make sense if race itself is functioning as a decisive factor in the admissions process, exactly what the Supreme Court explicitly prohibited.
The disparities show up just as starkly when you look at actual academic credentials rather than admissions outcomes alone. Across the combined 2024 and 2025 admissions cycles, fully half of Berkeley Law’s admitted black applicants had LSAT scores that fell below 95 percent of admitted white applicants’ scores. Worse still, more than a third of admitted black applicants, 37 percent specifically, had LSAT scores below 99 percent of admitted white applicants. In plain terms, a substantial share of admitted black students were being accepted over white applicants with dramatically stronger standardized test performance, a gap federal investigators say simply cannot be explained by anything other than race-based preference.
Perhaps most d*mning of all is how Berkeley Law appears to have handled students once they were actually admitted. The DOJ’s findings reveal that the law school’s application specifically asked applicants to identify their racial identity, explicitly so that admitted students could be “grouped” together with classmates sharing what the school called the same “primary identity.” Federal investigators didn’t mince words about what that practice actually amounts to: intentionally separating admitted students by race, a segregationist practice dressed up in modern diversity language.
Education Department Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Kimberly Richey drove home exactly why this matters constitutionally. “Title VI is clear: no student should be advantaged or disadvantaged in admissions because of the color of their skin,” Richey said. “The Supreme Court made equally clear that universities cannot evade the law by finding new ways to make race a factor in admissions decisions.” That’s precisely the loophole-hunting behavior that critics of elite academia have warned about since the Supreme Court’s SFFA decision came down — schools publicly claiming compliance while quietly finding new proxy methods to achieve the same racially discriminatory outcomes the ruling was supposed to prohibit.
Investigators didn’t stop at statistical analysis either. The DOJ specifically called out Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky for public statements suggesting the school intended to continue pursuing diversity outcomes regardless of the Supreme Court’s ruling, citing his public commitment that the school would “aggressively pursue” a diverse student body and faculty even after SFFA. That kind of public defiance from a sitting law school dean makes it considerably harder for Berkeley to argue any of this was accidental or the result of good-faith confusion about what the law actually requires.
Berkeley Law didn’t exactly help its own case during the investigation either. The DOJ noted the school refused to fully cooperate with information requests made throughout the compliance review process, which the Justice Department first opened back in March 2025. That kind of stonewalling, combined with the statistical evidence and Chemerinsky’s own public statements, paints a picture of an institution that understood exactly what it was doing and chose to obscure it from federal investigators rather than come clean.
This isn’t happening in isolation either. Berkeley Law is just the latest in a growing wave of elite academic institutions facing similar Title VI scrutiny from the Trump administration following the SFFA ruling. The Justice Department is separately investigating William and Mary for potential Civil Rights Act violations, part of a broader pattern of federal enforcement actions targeting universities that appear to have found creative workarounds rather than genuine compliance with the Supreme Court’s ban on race-conscious admissions.
For its part, Berkeley Law has denied using race as a factor in its admissions decisions, and the university will now have the opportunity to negotiate a settlement with federal officials to bring its practices into compliance. The Justice Department has made clear that if those negotiations fail, litigation will follow — meaning this fight is likely far from over, and Berkeley Law may soon find itself defending its admissions practices in federal court rather than just in the court of public opinion.
What makes this case particularly significant is the broader message it sends to elite academia nationwide. For years, prestigious universities have operated under the assumption that vague public commitments to “diversity” would shield them from serious legal scrutiny, even after the Supreme Court explicitly outlawed the practice these institutions claimed to have abandoned. Berkeley Law’s case demonstrates that the Trump administration is willing to dig into the actual admissions data, cross-reference it against academic credentials, and hold institutions legally accountable when the numbers reveal exactly the kind of racial discrimination the law was designed to prevent.
Asian American and white students who lost out on law school admission specifically because of their race now have a serious federal finding validating what many of them have long suspected: that Berkeley Law’s admissions process wasn’t the race-neutral system it claimed to be, but rather a system deliberately engineered to produce racially preferred outcomes in direct defiance of the highest court in the land. Whether Berkeley ultimately settles or fights this in court, the underlying data speaks for itself, and it’s exactly the kind of evidence conservatives have argued existed at elite institutions across the country for years.
