In the wake of the Supreme Court’s recent ruling overturning race-based affirmative action, law schools across the country, including Duke, have made several changes to their application components for the 2023-24 admissions cycle.
The court’s June decision came just two months before 1 September, the most popular date for law school applications to open. Some of the changes to the essay prompt were therefore announced on short notice.
Duke Law School previously required a personal statement and offered applicants two optional essay prompts: a diversity statement and a statement of interest. Following the Supreme Court’s decision, Duke Law School retained the personal statement and the optional statement of interest, but replaced the diversity statement with short essays.
Applicants are now required to submit one or two essays from a list of six prompts. Some of the new essay prompts ask applicants to share their “exposure to a diversity of perspectives and experiences” or their “distinctive background”, while others focus on applicants’ thoughts on equal justice, interest in public service, commitment to freedom of expression, and understanding of ethical leadership.
In previous years, many law schools required a personal statement and offered an optional diversity statement. For the 2023-24 admissions cycle, Harvard Law School has replaced the prompts with two new required essays, a statement of purpose and a statement of perspective. Several other law schools have also changed their application essay prompts, including Yale Law School.
“What they’re doing this cycle is testing the waters, if you will, to see if they’re getting the kind of information they want from applicants,” said Patrice Barley, a pre-law adviser.
According to Barley, the lack of uniformity among law school essay prompts means that applicants will have to spend more time tailoring their essays to each law school they apply to.
“Because the pivot came so late in the application cycle, I think law schools are going to give quite a bit of leeway in the essay reading process this year because applicants haven’t had a lot of time to grapple with them,” Barley said.
Revised essay prompts are not the only change to the law school admissions process. The logic games section of the Law School Admission Test will be replaced by either a reading comprehension or logical reasoning section, starting in August 2024. These changes will not affect the current admissions cycle.