UC Law School Violates Civil Rights, U.S. Says : Education: Affirmative action admissions plan at Berkeley is not consistent with the law, inquiry finds.

Affirmative action-based admissions policies at UC Berkeley’s prestigious law school violated civil rights law, a federal government investigation has found.

In a letter released Monday, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights found that some of Boalt Hall’s admissions practices “are not consistent” with Title VI of the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color or national origin.

Gary D. Jackson, regional civil rights director, cited the law school’s practices of reviewing and sorting applicants based in part on race and of keeping waiting lists by ethnic group.

Boalt Hall officials vigorously defended the school’s policies while agreeing to change some of them to satisfy the civil rights agency. The new policies will take effect with next’s year entering class.

The government’s findings covered 1988 through 1990, the year the investigation was launched.

“In practice, Boalt Hall administered its program of special consideration in a manner designed to ensure that the affirmative action percentage goals would be met,” Jackson wrote in a letter Friday to UC Berkeley Chancellor Chang-Lin Tien.

“The manner in which race and ethnicity were considered had the effect of circumscribing competition and effectively excluding applicants from consideration for available positions based on their race or ethnicity,” the letter said.

A settlement signed last week calls for future applicants to “not be considered separately for admission or admitted separately based on their race, color or national origin.”

Although it does not prohibit all preferential treatment of minorities, it says factors aimed at diversifying the student body must not be limited to ethnic background alone.

The school must now send the civil rights office a report detailing the steps it is taking to implement the agreed-upon changes. It must also file follow-up reports on Oct. 1 of next year and in 1994. The reports must lay out the numbers of applicants in each racial or ethnic group and how many in each group who were admitted, and a list of “diversity characteristics,” in addition to race, which were used in deciding on applicants.

Boalt Hall Dean Herma Hill Kay said she is proud of the school’s policy, begun in the 1960s, not only because it has helped bring qualified underrepresented minorities into the school but also because it “has had the fortunate effect of improving the quality of justice by contributing to diversity in the legal profession.”

The law school’s goal has been to admit between 23% and 27% of each entering class from various minority groups. This year’s class of 267 is 39% minority, but Kay said the procedures used to select the students from among more than 5,000 applicants were “fully consistent” with the Supreme Court’s 1978 Bakke decision. In that case, brought by a white man denied admission to UC Davis’ medical school, the nation’s highest court forbade the use of specific racial quotas but allowed race to be a factor in admissions decisions.

Despite Boalt Hall’s “disagreement with OCR’s legal interpretation,” Kay said the law school agreed to change some practices because it believes it can do so “without affecting our efforts to maintain a diverse student body.”

Among the changes under consideration are dropping the practice of using ethnicity or race to admit students on the waiting list, and ending the policy of assigning a single admissions team to read all applications of a particular minority group.

The federal findings were hailed by Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Huntington Beach), who had pushed for the inquiry since a 1989 Los Angeles Times story revealed the existence of the ethnically sorted waiting lists.

“This is the smoking gun that shows that discrimination is taking place and that the people being wounded are Asians, and to some extent, Caucasians. . . The liberals have gone so haywire and screwy with their good intentions that they are creating a racist society.”

Prof. Stephen R. Barnett, a 20-year member of the Boalt Hall faculty, said he supports the agreement the law school has signed with the Office for Civil Rights.

“This agreement will not prevent the school from continuing the successful affirmative action policies it has had for several years,” Barnett said.

Barnett has been critical of UC Berkeley’s undergraduate affirmative action policies, which he said “go too deep into the applicant pool” to find minority students who are not prepared to do well at Berkeley. He said these policies have led to “white flight” from the campus.

The federal civil rights agency also is investigating undergraduate admissions practices at UC Berkeley, according to an agency source.

Barnett said Boalt Hall has never gone as far as the undergraduate programs in using ethnic and racial criteria. But he criticized the law school for maintaining “racial waiting lists” for admission, saying a student would receive a notice saying something like “You are No. 10 on the black waiting list.”

That was “a benighted thing to do,” Barnett said, noting that it is all right to pursue affirmative action admissions policies “but not to set aside specific seats for racial groups.”

Times staff writer Robert W. Stewart in Washington contributed to this story.