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.
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” the ruling showed “a complete disregard for the rule of law.”
The university said in a statement it can prove otherwise and “is committed to ensuring that every student is admitted based on their merit, and not on their race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin.” UC Berkeley “will spare no effort to provide ample evidence showing that the university complies with all relevant laws, policies and rules governing admissions.”
The Trump administration opened its review of UC Berkeley admissions on March 27, 2025, and expanded it to the law school a month later. The DOJ is seeking a voluntary agreement with the university over admissions and will sue if one is not reached. The letter said Berkeley has received $369.1 million from the Education Department as of Sept. 3. It did not threaten to withdraw that money.
On Wednesday, the university said it has “scrupulously abided by” Proposition 209, the 1996 constitutional amendment barring the state from considering race in admissions at public institutions.
The federal government disagrees, and its letter cited the law school’s application form. The form said some students “feel supported when grouped with other students with whom they share a primary identity,” then asked applicants to check an identity from a list of racial and ethnic categories.
The Justice Department said that was how Berkeley Law “intentionally separates admitted students by race.” The form tells applicants to answer only “if this resonates with you,” and offers a “decline to state” choice.
The department said it also analyzed applicant data from 2021 through 2025. It said median Law School Admission Test scores for admitted Black students were about five points below those of admitted white and Asian students each year. It said that in 2024 and 2025 combined, half of admitted Black applicants scored below 95% of admitted white applicants. The letter does not detail the statistical model used to make the calculations.
The findings letter also cites public remarks by Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky.
It quotes him telling The New Yorker in 2022 that schools could replace the “explicit use of race” with “proxies for race.” The letter does not say he was describing Berkeley’s own practices. It also quotes a recorded panel at an Assn. of American Law Schools conference, which the letter does not date, where Chemerinsky allegedly talked about affirmative action by saying it is “very important not to talk about it in terms of it being an attempt to circumvent the decision,” a reference to the Supreme Court ruling against using race in admissions.
The letter also cites a 2023 Fox News report in which Chemerinsky described what he called “unstated affirmative action.” The comments were about faculty hiring, not admissions.
The investigation letter also cites one internal record: a Nov. 4, 2023, email where Dean of Admissions Kristin Theis-Alvarez answered a professor’s complaint about admissions. She acknowledged “the risk of becoming a target of litigation” but wrote “that this is a time to be as clear as possible about our values.”
Chemerinsky said in a statement that the school “scrupulously complies with Proposition 209, federal statutes, and the United States Constitution.” He said its policy “is clear that race is not considered in any way in admissions decisions.”
He said the law school can pursue diversity without breaking the law.
“Proposition 209, federal laws, and the Supreme Court’s decisions do not preclude schools from pursuing diversity so long as they give no preferences based on race,” he said. “Berkeley Law does not do so.”
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