Duke Law School’s PreLaw Fellowship demonstrates how elite universities are navigating the national ban on race-based admissions — and how far they can go without crossing the line.
The prestigious four-week summer program, which exposes “talented rising college sophomores and juniors to the study of law,” asks applicants a series of questions that allow discerning reviewers to gauge their races. Its recruitment and admissions practices also apparently target applicants based on race.
Racial proxies — a term for the use of non-racial characteristics to distinguish by race — have occupied an uncertain position in American civil rights law since the 2023 Students for Fair Admissions decision. In SFFA, Chief Justice Roberts limited the usage of race proxies to situations that “never use race as a stereotype or negative” and sunset after a set period of time.
The 2026 PreLaw Fellowship application, made publicly available on the program’s website, asks applicants the following demographic questions:
- “Have you ever attended an elementary or secondary school attended by more than 50% minority group students?”
- “Have you ever attended a prelaw program such as CLEO, PLUS, or TRIALS?”
- “Are you a first-generation college student?”
- “Were you raised in a rurally isolated environment?”
Source: 2026 Application
The first two questions state an interest in the racial composition of the applicant’s prior schools, as well as the applicant’s potential participation in prelaw initiatives historically created to support black, Hispanic, and other “minoritized” students in the legal profession. These make them race proxies.
I spoke with Ilya Shapiro, director of constitutional studies for the Manhattan Institute, about the matter, who told me, “Race proxies are not allowed. In SFFA, the Court said you cannot have preferences based on race, and that includes criteria that seem neutral on their face but are meant to do the same work as a racial preference.”
Those criteria could include a university’s “preferences for people based on zip codes” or any other demographic factor that might be highly correlated with race, Shapiro noted.
In addition to the yes-or-no questions, the application also includes a series of abbreviated essay prompts. The first asks students how their “different perspectives and experiences” have helped them serve their community. Another prompt asks applicants to reflect on how their “special background or experiences” may shape their understanding of the law. This question leaves space for applicants to highlight episodes closely correlated with race, socioeconomic status, or first-generation status.
Asking about a candidate’s “special background” or “different perspective” is not illegal, according to Shapiro.
“There is nothing wrong with having a program that seeks to find students that come from underprivileged backgrounds,” he remarked. “It’s only if you’re using criteria to find members of a particular race and not others, where they [the universities] can get in trouble.”
The PreLaw Fellowship has shifted its public presentation in the wake of SFFA. In June 2023, shortly after the Supreme Court’s decision, the website stated it was “targeted primarily to first- and second-year students of color” and focused on recruitment from Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities (HACUs). By January 2025, the Law School removed the phrase “students of color.” Today, the program “encourage[s] applications” from students attending colleges in the Southeastern U.S., first-generation students, and “students from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds.”
The program also provides a list of universities that successful applicants had attended for their undergraduate studies. Administrators highlight North Carolina A&T, Howard University, Florida A&M, Morehouse College, the University of Texas at El Paso, UNC Pembroke, the University of South Carolina, and Colgate University. Of these eight, six are designated Minority-Serving Institutions, and four are HBCUs. Howard, an HBCU located in Washington, DC; and Colgate, in upstate New York, fall outside the Southeast entirely.
Photos of the 2022 and 2023 cohorts — viewed with the program’s prior racial preferencing — suggest that the Law School was selecting applicants, at least in part, on the basis of race. Even the 2024 and 2025 cohorts, which were accepted after the SFFA decisions, also appear to have few to no white or Asian students.
Such evidence, though suggestive, does not necessarily prove that Duke Law is engaging in racial discrimination. However, Shapiro noted, “If before SFFA came down, a school was using racial preferences, and after SFFA, there’s no change in the outcome in terms of people admitted to a program, that seems like prima facie evidence that only superficial things have changed and they’re using proxies for their program.”
Shapiro would bracket this suspicion with an important caveat — the racial composition of the applicant pool.
“Look at the pool. These programs get their applicants from a highly concentrated pool of racial minorities — 80-90% — so almost everyone picked is a racial minority. That’s not as suspect.”
However, he added, if zero non-minority students have been selected, “that looks like evidence of discrimination.”
I asked Duke Law School and program administrators to describe the program’s selection process, post-SFFA changes, and to share generic demographic data about applicants since the program’s inception.
“The goal of the program is to encourage more students to consider a legal career, particularly if they don’t have lawyers in their personal network of friends and family,” Erin Medlyn, associate dean for communications at Duke Law, told me in an email.
She did not address either the racial composition of recent cohorts or the post-SFFA changes. Duke Law did not share more information about the cohort selection process.
The program’s origins can help explain why these cohort patterns persist.
Duke’s PreLaw Fellowship, previously known as the PLUS Program at Duke Law, was initially funded by the Law School Admission Council’s PLUS initiative, a program openly committed to “diversity, equity, and inclusion” and aimed at supporting “minoritized students.” In a 2022 request for proposal for the PLUS program, LSAC defined “minoritized students” as “members of groups that face social, political, economic, and educational barriers that constrict them.” The RFP targeted women, who are not “minorities in legal education today,” alongside “students of color, first-generation college students, students with disabilities, students of low socioeconomic status, and LGBTQ+, genderqueer or nonbinary, and gender nonconforming students.” The PreLaw Fellowship is today supported by the Duke Endowment.
Though no longer funded by LSAC, Duke’s PreLaw Fellowship still appears to leverage admission for students who have participated in programs “such as PLUS, CLEO, and TRIALS” — initiatives originally designed to support underrepresented minority students. As a result, applicants already within these networks are far more likely to know about and access the fellowship, while others may never encounter it at all.
Setting aside whether the use of these programs in the application process constitutes a racial proxy, it remains the case, in my view, that the fellowship’s structure advantages applicants already situated within established recruitment networks.
The result is what economists refer to as a network effect. The only people who know these opportunities exist are often those who, before the ban, were the only ones explicitly invited to participate — “minoritized students.”
If these network effects are the real cause behind the racial composition of the PreLaw Fellowship, then the program may not be violating the letter of the law.
Shapiro put it this way. “Let’s say there’s a white applicant to this program that comes from a hardscrabble background who applies and doesn’t get picked. He says that the way they market the program is clearly intended to get minorities and therefore they discriminated against me.” In such a lawsuit, Shapiro explained, the university would likely argue that racial targeting wasn’t their goal. “But then the question is: Why aren’t you marketing it more broadly?”