At the end of finals period each May, the Duke Law Journal hosts a two-week-long competition to select its next crop of editors. Applicants write a 12-page memo, or casenote, analyzing an appellate court decision, as well as a 500-word essay about what they would “contribute” to the journal.
Students are chosen based on their grades, casenotes, and personal statements. Less than 20 percent of the class makes it onto the law review, which is overseen by Duke Law School and has no legal existence apart from it.
To help students prepare for the competition, the journal circulates a guide on how to write the casenote. Last year, however, it decided to give some students an additional document.
In a packet prepared for the law school’s affinity groups, the journal instructed minority students to highlight their race and gender as part of their personal statements—and revealed that they would earn extra points for doing so.
The packet, obtained exclusively by the Washington Free Beacon, included the rubric used to evaluate the personal statements. Applicants can earn up to 10 points for explaining how their “membership in an underrepresented group” will “lend itself to … promoting diverse voices,” and an additional 3-5 points if they “hold a leadership position in an affinity group.”
To drive home the point, the packet included four examples of personal statements that had gotten students on the law review. Three of those statements referenced race in the first sentence, with one student boasting that, “[a]s an Asian-American woman and a daughter of immigrants, I am afforded with different perspectives, experiences, and privileges.”
A fourth student waited until the last paragraph to disclose that she was “a Middle Eastern Jewish woman,” an “intersectional identity” she said would “prove useful” in a “collaborative environment.”
“As a woman,” the student wrote, “and a woman with Middle Eastern heritage, I also understand of [sic] the importance of presenting a solid work product and building credibility.”
The packet was only distributed to the affinity groups, according to a person familiar with the matter, which meant that minority students had access to inside information about the scoring process. The journal explicitly told those groups not to share the packet with other students, according to messages reviewed by the Free Beacon, and indicated on the first page that it had been made for affinity groups.
When the Supreme Court banned affirmative action in 2023, it said that colleges and universities could not use essays as a Trojan horse for racial preferences. The documents from Duke illustrate how a top law review has skirted that directive, creating a points-based system that foregrounds race and could put the law school in legal jeopardy.
“This is clearly illegal,” said David Bernstein, a professor of constitutional law at George Mason University. “They’re using the personal statement as a proxy for race.”
Even if they weren’t using it that way, Bernstein added, giving the rubric only to the affinity groups was itself a form of unlawful discrimination. The packet also included a separate rubric used to grade the casenote, giving minority students a leg up on that part of the competition as well.
The packet was overseen by journal editor in chief Gabriela Nagle Alverio, who received her B.A. in Gender and Sexuality Studies from Stanford University and, before coming to Duke, worked as a diversity consultant for Inclusion Design Group.
Alverio was one of six consultants at the firm, which helps businesses “engrave DEI into their day to day culture.” The group boasts that it has worked with hundreds of companies, including Amazon and LinkedIn, to “create environments that are both culturally safe and brave,” and describes Alverio as “a political scientist whose passion for diversity and inclusion is rooted in her study of systems of power.”
In 2019, the firm’s bio notes, Alverio helped develop a “diversity education curriculum” that was mandatory for all Stanford Medical School students.
Alverio did not respond to a request for comment.
While some law schools claim to be separate from their eponymous law reviews, the Duke Law Journal is hosted on a university website and copyrighted by Duke Law School. And though student editors grade the casenote competition, the entire process is “refereed” by law school administrators, according to the journal’s “About Us” page.
Those facts likely subject the journal to Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, the law the Supreme Court used to outlaw affirmative action. Erin Wilcox, an attorney at the Pacific Legal Foundation, said that the ruling placed strict limits on how law reviews can select editors.
“The Supreme Court was clear that both the Constitution and Title VI require individuals to be judged on their own unique qualifications, not on immutable characteristics like race or sex,” Wilcox said. “This is true whether you’re applying for admission to Harvard or a place on the Duke Law Journal.”
Duke Law School and the university’s general counsel, Kim Taylor, did not respond to requests for comment.
The revelations about the journal come as other law reviews are facing legal challenges to their own admissions policies. The Michigan Law Review was sued last week for allegedly discriminating against white applicants. And three federal agencies are investigating the Harvard Law Review after the Free Beacon published documents showing the scope of the journal’s racial preferences.
Other law reviews, including Northwestern’s and New York University’s, have been sued for unlawful discrimination in recent years.
At Duke, the personal statement also seems to have encouraged a kind of performative victimhood, with students claiming to have suffered vague and intangible injuries at the hands of the white people around them.
“As a Latina woman,” one student wrote, “I am used to being a part of white, primarily male dominated fields. Growing up, my skills and abilities were always questioned, as if people had to ‘make sure I could handle it.’”
Another student complained that her first year at Duke Law “harkened back” to her childhood in a “white-majority community,” where teachers “typecasted” her as a model student “before I even had the chance to speak.”
Thankfully, she continued, Duke had given her “a tightknit group of friends and mentors from different backgrounds, races, and sexuality [sic].”
“Throughout the year, we talked about the lack of diversity on campus, times where we were one of few people of color in a room and the hurtful exchanges we had with students and professors who belittled our experiences and backgrounds,” the student wrote. “A diverse legal industry begins with a diverse law school experience, and I am committed to fostering an environment that welcomes the voices of marginalized groups.”
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