{"id":2662226,"date":"2026-09-16T07:38:02","date_gmt":"2026-09-16T11:38:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/utm_sourcerssutm_mediumrssutm_campaigndoj-goes-after-berkeley-law-for-discrimination-against-white-applicants\/"},"modified":"2026-09-16T07:43:24","modified_gmt":"2026-09-16T11:43:24","slug":"utm_sourcerssutm_mediumrssutm_campaigndoj-goes-after-berkeley-law-for-discrimination-against-white-applicants","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/utm_sourcerssutm_mediumrssutm_campaigndoj-goes-after-berkeley-law-for-discrimination-against-white-applicants\/","title":{"rendered":"DOJ Goes After Berkeley For Discrimination Vs. White Applicants"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">18<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Futm_sourcerssutm_mediumrssutm_campaigndoj-goes-after-berkeley-law-for-discrimination-against-white-applicants%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=2662226&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><p>Federal investigators have found that UC Berkeley School of Law violated the Civil Rights Act by discriminating against Asian adn white applicants in admissions for 2024 and 2025, after recent Supreme Court rulings restricted race-conscious admissions. Despite legal limits, Berkeley allegedly used race as a proxy in its admissions process, favoring black applicants significantly over similarly qualified white candidates. This pattern aligns with findings at other top law and medical schools, suggesting widespread issues in how institutions consider race in admissions. Experts emphasize that such practices undermine merit and public trust, advocating for stricter accountability and reforms to ensure compliance with the law. The case underscores the importance of maintaining fairness and integrity in admissions processes that impact future legal and medical professionals.  <\/p>\n<p class=\"readmore\">\n    <button onclick=\"showReadMore()\" id=\"readmorebtn\">Read more&#8230;<\/button>\n<\/p>\n<hr id=\"line\">\n<span id=\"more\"><\/p>\n<div>\n<p>On Sept. 9, federal investigators concluded that the University of California, Berkeley School of Law <a href=\"https:\/\/www.justice.gov\/opa\/pr\/joint-investigation-us-justice-department-and-us-department-education-finds-uc-berkeley-law\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">broke the law<\/a>. Not some obscure regulation buried in an agency handbook. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.justice.gov\/crt\/fcs\/TitleVI\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964<\/a>, the same statute Berkeley\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<p>In 2022, Berkeley Dean Erwin Chemerinsky told the New Yorker that colleges would have to \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.justice.gov\/crt\/media\/1460556\/dl\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">find ways to achieve diversity that can\u2019t be documented as violating the Constitution<\/a>.\u201d That\u2019s a law school dean telling colleagues to dodge a ruling without leaving fingerprints.<\/p>\n<p>A quick refresher on constitutional law: In 2023 in <em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.supremecourt.gov\/Opinions\/22pdf\/20-1199_Hgdj.Pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard<\/a>, <\/em>the Supreme Court ruled that Harvard\u2019s and the University of North Carolina\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/doj-sues-harvard-over-access-to-race-based-admissions-documents\/\" title=\"DOJ sues Harvard over access to ...-based ... documents\">race-conscious admissions programs violated<\/a> 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\u2019s personal story, but not to use race itself, or a stand-in for it, as a plus factor. Berkeley\u2019s own numbers show which side of that line it landed on.<\/p>\n<h2>Berkeley\u2019s Own Numbers<\/h2>\n<p>The numbers the Justice Department pulled out of Berkeley\u2019s own files make the point better than any op-ed could. In 2025, after controlling for LSAT scores and undergraduate GPA, black applicants had <a href=\"https:\/\/www.justice.gov\/crt\/media\/1460556\/dl\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">5.8 times the odds of admission<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n<p>The mechanism, per the findings letter, ran through an application prompt asking how an applicant\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<h2><strong>Larger Pattern<\/strong><\/h2>\n<p>Berkeley isn\u2019t an outlier; it\u2019s part of a pattern. The Justice Department announced almost identical findings regarding <a href=\"https:\/\/www.justice.gov\/opa\/pr\/justice-department-finds-duke-law-school-discriminates-based-race-admissions\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Duke Law in August<\/a>, covering cycles back to 2023. Medical schools at Yale, UCLA, and UC Davis got there first, and the Justice Department opened <a href=\"https:\/\/www.justice.gov\/opa\/pr\/justice-department-expands-admissions-investigations-15-additional-medical-schools\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">15 more investigations into medical schools\u2019 admissions in June<\/a>, from Harvard to Johns Hopkins to Stanford. This is standard operating procedure across American legal and medical education, three years after the court spoke.<\/p>\n<p>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\u2019s Civil Rights Division put it plainly: too many top schools are \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.justice.gov\/opa\/pr\/justice-department-expands-admissions-investigations-15-additional-medical-schools\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">more concerned about the demographics of their incoming classes<\/a>\u201d 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.<\/p>\n<p>None of this means an applicant\u2019s 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\u2019t measure. But there\u2019s a real difference between an essay about lived experience and building a prompt and rubric around race as a category, and Berkeley\u2019s own dean drew that line himself.<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019ve spent decades testifying as an expert witness on fiduciary duty, in courtrooms where \u201cI meant well\u201d doesn\u2019t 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\u2019t 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\u2019t an interpretation dispute. It\u2019s a known breach of duty, owed to the taxpayers funding the school\u2019s grants and to every applicant who lost a seat to skin color instead of merit.<\/p>\n<h2><strong>What to Expect<\/strong><\/h2>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>The late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia used to say that the Constitution means what it says until it\u2019s lawfully amended, not whatever a committee decides it should mean this semester. Berkeley\u2019s 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\u2019t take a uniform to know a deliberate breach carries consequences on its own.<\/p>\n<p>The fix isn\u2019t 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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p>      Jay Rogers is a financial professional with more than 30 years of experience in private equity, private credit, hedge funds, and wealth management. He has a B.S. from Northeastern University and has completed postgraduate studies at UCLA, the University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard. He writes about issues in finance, constitutional law, national security, human nature, and public policy.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<p><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Berkeley Law violated civil rights law, DOJ finds<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4386,"featured_media":2662227,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Boalt_Hall_University_of_California_Berkeley_Law_School._-_panoramio-e1789486628358.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[5727,33274,5102],"class_list":["post-2662226","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-berkeley","tag-civil-rights","tag-discrimination"],"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Boalt_Hall_University_of_California_Berkeley_Law_School._-_panoramio-e1789486628358.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2662226","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4386"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2662226"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2662226\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2662234,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2662226\/revisions\/2662234"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2662227"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2662226"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2662226"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2662226"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}