UC Berkeley law school illegally weighed race in admissions, Justice Department alleges

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Set us as preferred UC Berkeley’s law school discriminated against white and Asian applicants by illegally using race in admissions, the Department of Justice alleged Wednesday in an investigative finding that expands the Trump administration’s probes into University of California admissions practices.For more than a year, the federal government has focused its lens on the state’s vast public university system — with investigations, lawsuits and funding threats — alleging illegal race-conscious admissions at multiple campuses, including findings against medical schools at UCLA and UC Davis.UC has disputed the federal findings at its campuses and said the university system complies with federal and state laws.The department’s six-page letter sent to Berkeley said the law school used essay prompts, an application question about racial identity and other strategies to weigh race when it chose its incoming classes of 2024 and 2025, after the Supreme Court struck down race-based affirmative action in college admissions and decades after it was outlawed in California.California The Justice Department said UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by discriminating on the basis of race in admissions for the incoming classes of 2023 through 2025.Federal officials said their analysis of school data showed Black applicants in 2025 had 5.8 times higher odds of admission than white applicants with similar qualifications.

While they cited alleged violations from past years, the department said “this discrimination is ongoing.” The Justice Department and the Department of Education jointly announced the findings.Assistant Atty.

Gen.Harmeet K.

Dhillon, who leads the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, said the law school’s “deliberate efforts to circumvent” th...