The Department of Justice and the Department of Education announced Wednesday that the University of California, Berkeley School of Law spent years discriminating against white and Asian applicants using “race, essay prompts, and other tactics” to tilt admissions toward Black candidates, in violation of Title VI and the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard. Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon called it “a complete disregard for the rule of law,” which, ahem, is a bold phrase to deploy on behalf of this particular administration.
But before we accept that Berkeley Law has been smuggling racial quotas past the Supreme Court, it’s worth looking at what all this alleged favoritism actually produced. Berkeley Law’s October 2025 enrollment was 1,128 students. Of those, 516 are white and 293 are Asian. The number of Black students is <checks notes> 51. (No, there is not a digit missing in that number.)
If this is what putting a thumb on the scale for Black applicants looks like, someone should check whether the thumb is still attached.
The government’s headline number is that Black applicants had “5.8 times higher odds of admission than comparable white applicants” in 2025, a figure that does a tremendous amount of work on the back of the word “comparable.” The DOJ’s idea of comparable is mostly the LSAT, it notes that half of admitted Black students scored lower than 95 percent of admitted white students. Set aside that holistic admissions, weighing more than a single standardized test, remains perfectly legal, and has been since long before anyone at MAGA Main Justice discovered a passion for civil rights. The premise here is that any deviation from ranking applicants by LSAT is presumptively discriminatory is… not what SFFA held.
Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, who has forgotten more constitutional law than anyone the Civil Rights Division currently employs ever learned — says the school does not consider race “in any way,” and that “federal statutes and the Supreme Court’s decisions do not preclude schools from pursuing diversity so long as they give no preferences based on race.” “UC Berkeley is committed to ensuring that every student is admitted based on their merit, and not on their race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin,” he said. “UC Berkeley will spare no effort to provide ample evidence showing that the university complies with all relevant laws, policies and rules governing admissions.”
This is just the latest salvo in the Trump administration’s war on DEI. It previously told law schools to scrub “diversity” from their websites or lose federal funding, then spent 18 months browbeating the ABA into gutting its diversity accreditation standard before moving to strip the organization of its accreditor role anyway, and then turned the EEOC and a stack of executive orders loose on Biglaw for the crime of caring about diversity out loud.
At least Berkeley, unlike some other elite law schools, appears to have a spine.
Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, host of The Jabot podcast, and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter @Kathryn1 or Bluesky @Kathryn1
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