Did a Federal Judge Dismiss the Trump Administration's Lawsuit Seeking Harvard's Admissions Data?
Yes. U.S. District Judge Myong Joun in Boston dismissed the Trump administration's lawsuit against Harvard University on November 2, ruling that the Justice Department had not shown it followed the steps the law requires before suing to force Harvard to hand over applicant-level admissions data. The dismissal was without prejudice, which means the government can fix the defects the judge identified and file the case again.
The plain reality is the order the law sets. Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 does not let the Justice Department go straight to court, as Harvard Magazine's account of the ruling lays out: it must first determine that voluntary compliance cannot be achieved, get the attorney general's direct approval, and formally notify the school of the specific failure to comply and the action that will follow. Judge Joun found the complaint did not allege that the department told Harvard litigation would follow if it did not comply, and did not allege the specific failure identified. The government had the power to ask for the data; the record it brought to court did not show it had earned the right to demand it there.
The administration's claim is that Harvard left it no choice. When the Justice Department sued in February, Attorney General Pam Bondi accused Harvard of withholding information needed to determine whether the university is complying with the Supreme Court's 2023 ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which banned the consideration of race in admissions. Harvard's claim runs the other way: the university said it had been responding to the government's inquiries in good faith, it turned over more than 2,000 pages of documents, and its lawyers argued the lawsuit was retaliation for refusing the administration's wider demands. Joun decided neither claim, because the case failed at the threshold before either could be reached.
"A deadline and a threat to sue, standing alone, do not necessarily demonstrate compliance."
The common-sense principle is simple: a lawsuit filed before the required steps are done is not yet a case a court can act on. The procedure is not a loophole Harvard found — it is the sequence written into the law, and the government is bound by it like anyone else. The consequence follows directly. Because the dismissal is without prejudice, nothing in the underlying fight has been settled: not whether Harvard still considers race, and not whether the government can lawfully demand individual applicant files. A Justice Department spokesperson told Inside Higher Ed the government will refile an amended complaint, and department spokeswoman Kiersten Pels said the court dismissed the case on narrow procedural grounds and invited the United States to amend it. So the question this ruling leaves behind is the one the next round will answer: if the department does the steps in order and comes back, will a court then order Harvard to open its applicant files?
The details that matter are these. The government sought five years of applicant-level data from Harvard College, Harvard Medical School and Harvard Law School — academic qualifications, race and ethnicity, application materials including essays, and admissions decisions — as part of Title VI reviews. Judge Joun also found the Education Department had not shown it completed its own required steps before its parallel inquiry was folded into the case in May. This is one of a run of courtroom setbacks for the administration at Harvard, which has already won rulings blocking efforts to cancel more than $2 billion in federal grants and to bar it from hosting international students; on the blog, we covered the dismissal of the smuggling charges against Harvard scientist Kseniia Petrova in the same Boston courthouse. And the numbers underneath the fight moved again last week: Harvard College's Class of 2030 figures show Black students at 9.3 percent of the class, down from 11.5 percent the year before — the third straight fall since the Supreme Court's ruling — with Asian American students at 43.2 percent.
Judge Joun closed the ruling by drawing its own boundary line: "Those questions remain open."