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UCLA Law School admissions DOJ 2026

Pick a race, any race, and try writing a rule that skips them on purpose. Since 1964, federal law has said you can't do that in either direction. That's the theory. For decades before it, and in plenty of offices after, the one group that could be legally passed over in admissions, in hiring, and in government contract decisions was white people. The word for it was never discrimination. Diversity was the label. Meanwhile the bar went down for one group and up for another, and Asian applicants got cut right along with white ones. That is the thing that cracked open the case against Harvard. 2023: the Supreme Court shut the schemes down at universities. 2025: the requirement for federal contractors to run affirmative action got dropped, and the majority finally got the same footing in lawsuits as everyone else. Paperwork doesn't sync to reality on day one. By 2026, the Department of Justice recorded that UCLA Law School was filtering out white and Asian applicants whose scores matched the ones it accepted. That gap between the statute and the office is the part worth staring at.

1h

Pavellim@pavellim

Follow

UCLA Law School admissions DOJ 2026

Pick a race, any race, and try writing a rule that skips them on purpose. Since 1964, federal law has said you can't do that in either direction. That's the theory. For decades before it, and in plenty of offices after, the one group that could be legally passed over in admissions, in hiring, and in government contract decisions was white people. The word for it was never discrimination. Diversity was the label. Meanwhile the bar went down for one group and up for another, and Asian applicants got cut right along with white ones. That is the thing that cracked open the case against Harvard. 2023: the Supreme Court shut the schemes down at universities. 2025: the requirement for federal contractors to run affirmative action got dropped, and the majority finally got the same footing in lawsuits as everyone else. Paperwork doesn't sync to reality on day one. By 2026, the Department of Justice recorded that UCLA Law School was filtering out white and Asian applicants whose scores matched the ones it accepted. That gap between the statute and the office is the part worth staring at.

1h