DOJ Goes After Berkeley For Discrimination Vs. White Applicants– thefederalist.com

On Sept. 9, federal investigators concluded that the University of California, Berkeley School of Law broke the law. Not some obscure regulation buried in an agency handbook. Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the same statute Berkeley’s 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.

In 2022, Berkeley Dean Erwin Chemerinsky told the New Yorker that colleges would have to “find ways to achieve diversity that can’t be documented as violating the Constitution.” That’s a law school dean telling colleagues to dodge a ruling without leaving fingerprints.

A quick refresher on constitutional law: In 2023 in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, the Supreme Court ruled that Harvard’s and the University of North Carolina’s race-conscious admissions programs violated 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’s personal story, but not to use race itself, or a stand-in for it, as a plus factor. Berkeley’s own numbers show which side of that line it landed on.