The Department of Justice on Wednesday filed a complaint seeking to join a lawsuit against a major medical school accused of illegally considering race in its admissions process.
A class action lawsuit filed in May 2025 by Do No Harm (DNH) accuses the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) medical school of using race as a factor in admissions “under the guise of ‘holistic’ review.” The DOJ on Wednesday filed a complaint seeking to join the suit, challenging the constitutionality of those practices and asking the court to permanently prohibit the school from “in any way” considering race in admissions decisions.
“After a long history of moving incrementally away from racial preferences in education, this Nation and its Supreme Court cast off this vestige of our troubled history surrounding race and set out to mandate colorblind admissions in all public (and publicly funded) universities,” the complaint states. “There is but one legal avenue for a public or publicly funded medical school to pursue diversity in medicine: admit the most qualified candidates regardless of race, and expect that those most qualified candidates will come from every race, because they do.”
The DOJ wrote that race-based admissions not only undermines civil rights protections, but results in lowered standards and “less well academically qualified doctors practicing medicine.” It also warned that in doing so, patients will be forced to question whether their minority doctor “is really qualified to practice medicine and can give them the same quality care as a White or Asian doctor who did not receive preferential admission to medical school.”
Join the conversation as a VIP Member