Justice Department Says UCLA Law School Illegally Used Race to Pick Students

Black applicants had about seven times the admission odds of comparable white applicants in 2025, the department alleges. UCLA denies it.

UCLA's law school favored Black and Latino applicants over white and Asian ones for three straight years, the Justice Department alleged on Thursday.

The department wants the University of California to resolve the matter in a voluntary agreement, and it says it'll sue if it can't get one. UCLA Law denies breaking any law, the Los Angeles Times reported.

The department laid out its case in an eight-page letter. It said the school "intentionally discriminated on the basis of race" when it filled its 2023, 2024 and 2025 classes. That, the letter said, violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Supreme Court's 2023 decision striking down race-based affirmative action at colleges. It also said the discrimination hasn't stopped.

The department said it went through internal documents and seven years of application data after opening its investigation on April 18, 2025. Its central statistic covers the 2025 class: a Black applicant's odds of getting in were about seven times those of a white applicant with an otherwise comparable file. For Latino applicants, the department put the gap at about double.

It also pointed to the Law School Admission Test, which is scored from 120 to 180. From 2019 through 2024, the department said, the median score of admitted Black students ran five to seven points below that of admitted white students. In 2025, the medians were 168 and 172. The letter noted that 168 was also the median for the white and Asian applicants the school rejected.

"UCLA Law School runs a two-tiered admissions system whose academic bar for acceptance shifts up or down depending on the color of your skin," Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon, who heads the department's Civil Rights Division, said in a statement.

UCLA Law said in its own statement that it follows every law that applies to its admissions decisions, and it pointed to Proposition 209, the 1996 California measure that bars public universities from considering race. The school described its review as comprehensive and based on merit, and said it's "confident in our process."

Its written admissions policy says grades and standardized test scores carry substantial weight. The school also counts economic, physical or other hardships an applicant has overcome, along with scholarship and work or career achievement.

The letter leaned on more than test data. At a 2023 open house focused on diversity, the department said, school staff invited applicants to disclose their race through essay answers or a diversity statement.

The department also quoted a June 2023 email from Assistant Dean of Admissions Robert Schwartz, written ahead of the justices' decision. In it, the letter alleges, Schwartz wrote that "any changes in the law announced by the Supreme Court will not change anything at UCLA Law."

A run of federal findings

UCLA Law is the latest target in a string of federal actions against University of California admissions, most of them aimed at highly selective law and medical schools. Every UC campus named has denied the allegations. The sequence so far, as the Times has tracked it:

• May 2025: Do No Harm and Students for Fair Admissions, two advocacy groups, sued UCLA's medical school over the use of race in admissions. Students for Fair Admissions had brought the 2023 Supreme Court cases.
• January 2026: The Justice Department joined that lawsuit.
• May 2026: The department issued a finding accusing the medical school of intentionally considering race. The school denies it.
• July 20, 2026: The department alleged that UC San Diego illegally uses race in admissions.
• Aug. 7, 2026: It said Duke Law School illegally considered race.
• Sept. 5, 2026: The IRS said USC and Stanford could lose tax breaks over race-based aid, the Globe reported.
• Sept. 9, 2026: The department issued a finding against UC Berkeley's law school, which denied it.
• Sept. 22, 2026: It alleged that UC San Francisco illegally favored Black and Latino medical school applicants.

If no deal is reached, a lawsuit over the law school would put the Justice Department in court against UCLA a third time. It has already joined the medical school admissions suit, and it's suing under Title VI in a separate case accusing UCLA of ignoring antisemitism. UC asked a federal judge to throw that one out as political coercion, the Times reported on Oct. 1.

Source: latimes.com, retrieved October 2, 2026.