The Justice Department and Department of Education have announced a joint finding that UC Berkeley School of Law discriminated on the basis of race in its admissions process, marking a significant federal civil-rights enforcement action in the post-Students for Fair Admissions landscape. Although the announcement is not a final court judgment, it signals how aggressively federal agencies may scrutinize admissions practices at colleges and universities following the Supreme Court’s rejection of race-conscious admissions policies.

For Berkeley Law, the immediate stakes are obvious: a federal finding of noncompliance can trigger pressure to change admissions criteria, recordkeeping, training, and internal review procedures.

The U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division announced on September 8 that it reached an agreement with Kansas in a lawsuit alleging discrimination against a servicemember, marking another example of the federal government using civil-rights enforcement tools against a state-level employer.

While the public announcement was brief, the development is significant for employment lawyers, government counsel, and compliance teams because it reinforces that servicemember-protection laws remain an active enforcement priority.

The Justice Department said on August 6 that Duke University School of Law intentionally discriminated on the basis of race in admissions for its 2023, 2024, and 2025 entering classes, concluding that the school’s practices violated Title VI and the Supreme Court’s ban on race-based admissions in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College et al.

The finding is significant not only because it targets a prominent law school, but because it shows continued federal enforcement activity after Students for Fair Admissions. That 2023 decision reshaped the legal framework for admissions nationwide, holding that the use of race in college admissions could not survive constitutional scrutiny.

The Justice Department has announced a proposed settlement with Willow Bridge, one of the nation’s largest landlords, in a fair housing matter that puts tenant-screening practices squarely in the compliance spotlight. The case centers on allegations that the company’s use of criminal-history screening policies unlawfully discriminated against Black applicants, in violation of the Fair Housing Act.

According to the government, blanket or overly restrictive screening standards can create a disparate impact when they disproportionately exclude protected groups without sufficient justification.

A new filing in View full case on Docket Alarm puts a familiar but often decisive appellate issue front and center: whether the appeal should be dismissed before merits briefing proceeds. On June 10, 2026, appellee The Legal Aid Society filed Motion No. 14 in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, seeking dismissal of the appeal in docket 26-1232.

Although the docket entry itself is concise, motions to dismiss at the appellate level typically target threshold defects that can end a case without reaching the substantive issues.

PayPal has agreed to waive roughly $30 million in fees to resolve a U.S. Department of Justice investigation into a 2020 program aimed at supporting Black- and minority-owned businesses. According to the government, the program unlawfully favored certain businesses on the basis of race, making the settlement a notable marker in the ongoing legal scrutiny of corporate diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.

The matter is significant because it shows how civil-rights enforcement is being applied outside the traditional employment setting.