Amy Chua

Non-Sequiturs: 01.18.11

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* UVA Law grad Corwin Levi used his law school notes as his artistic canvas. I bet he has a really snazzy collar. [Ex-Lawyers Club]

* Not all professors are lazy. Professor Ilya Somin hops on the “make new exam questions” bandwagon. [Volokh Conspiracy]

* Professor Stephen Bainbridge has another theory on how “Tiger Mother” Amy Chua got hired by Yale; there’s always more than one way to skin a cat. [Professor Bainbridge]

* FCC approves the merger between Kabletown (sorry, Comcast) and NBC. [Huffington Post]

* Miss America 2011, Teresa Scanlan — who wants to be a Supreme Court justice, then president — opines on WikiLeaks. [Jezebel]

* What, do you want Apple’s quarterly filings to include reports on Steve Jobs’s colon? [WSJ Law Blog]

* You can’t make a law that favors one religion over another. But, in Alabama at least, it’s perfectly okay for the governor of the state to talk about how everybody should prefer his religion over all others. [Gawker]

* It’d be great if everybody remembered Martin Luther King’s essential message of non-violence. [A Public Defender via Blawg Review]

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Yale Law Prof Amy Chua Backs Away from Controversial Claims About Superiority of Chinese Mothers

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Amy Chua

If you’re going to be a diva, then own it. Was this lesson lost on Yale law professor Amy Chua, the author of an incendiary essay in last weekend’s Wall Street Journal, Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior, and a new book about Eastern versus Western parenting styles, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother?

Professor Chua seems to have it all: brains and beauty; an incredible academic career, with an endowed chair at Yale Law School; a hunky husband, fellow YLS prof Jed Rubenfeld; and two lovely and accomplished daughters. (Speaking of Chua’s kids, does anyone know where her oldest girl, Sophia Chua-Rubenfeld, is attending, or applying to attend, college? To Asian parents, sending a child to a top college is the ultimate vindication.)

Sophia Chua-Rubenfeld

But Amy Chua may need to work on her bitch-goddess qualities. After her controversial essay about the superiority of Chinese mothers and hard-ass Asian parenting set the blogosphere on fire — and sent her book rocketing to #5 on the Amazon bestseller list — Chua backtracked a bit, instead of defiantly standing her ground.

In interviews with the San Francisco Chronicle, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times, among other outlets, the self-proclaimed “Tiger Mom” seemed to turn into a pussycat….

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Biglaw Baby Making 101

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There’s been so much talk of Biglaw women and baby making floating around the blogosphere this week that I think there must have been a “repopulate the species” action memo in US Weekly. Existentially, I blame the season. It’s January, and childless professional women just went through another holiday season getting bombarded with images of children on television (to say nothing of little nieces or nephews that might have been swarming like locusts when they visited family). They return back to their regularly scheduled lives, many of them with raises or bonuses for the new year, and now they’re looking around at their barren apartments and thinking, “What am I missing?”

You’ll see the same thing happen to men… after the Superbowl. They’ll watch the game and have fond memories of their dad or uncle or somebody teaching them fun things they can do with balls. Then post-Superbowl depression will set in, and you’ll see men sleepwalking through “honey-do” errands with vacant, suicidal looks on their faces. They’ll look around at fathers who don’t even seem to care which NCAA teams are on the bubble, and they’ll think, “What am I missing?”

But this week it’s women who are having replication pangs. Clear as I can tell, Vivia Chen on The Careerist started the ball rolling in the legal blogosphere by repackaging a Slate XX Factor article (by Dahlia Lithwick) that featured one woman telling other women that they were hobbling their careers by planning for a family before they had one.

And since women generally can’t stand to even be in the same room with each other, it wasn’t too long before everybody was rolling out their best women-dogging-other-women content….

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Yale Law Professor Amy Chua Writes in Praise of Crazy Asian Moms

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Amy Chua: Yale Law professor and Tiger Mother.

Right now the legal world is abuzz about an essay published over the weekend in the Wall Street Journal by Amy Chua, a prominent (and pulchritudinous) professor at Yale Law School. The essay’s title, Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior, pretty much says it all. The piece is based on Chua’s new book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, described by its publisher as “[a]n awe-inspiring, often hilarious, and unerringly honest story of one mother’s exercise in extreme parenting, revealing the rewards-and the costs-of raising her children the Chinese way.”

What does raising children “the Chinese way” entail? It’s not hard to guess. Here’s a good summary from Vivia Chen (one of the many Asian-American females to write about Chua; see also Jen Chung of Gothamist and Elizabeth Chang of the Washington Post): “Chua is an überachiever who’s hell-bent on raising her kids to be at least as accomplished as she is. Chua seems to delight in playing up to the stereotype of the pushy, academically obsessed Asian mom. So much so that I thought (for a moment) that she was pulling our legs. But she’s serious.”

Very serious. Let’s take a look at how Chua and her husband — Jed Rubenfeld, a Yale law professor, overachiever, and certified hottie, just like his wife — raise their two daughters, Sophia and Louisa Chua-Rubenfeld….

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Jed Rubenfeld May Be Hot, But His Book Is Not

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jed rubenfeld 5.JPGOr so says the Wall Street Journal, in a fascinating front-page article about the disappointing sales for the Yale law professor’s debut novel, The Interpretation of Murder.

The strikingly handsome Jed Rubenfeld is a con law professor and deputy dean at Yale Law School (as well as a contestant in our Law School Dean hotties contest; but sorry, ladies, he’s married to fellow YLS professor Amy Chua). Henry Holt & Co. paid Rubenfeld an advance of $800,000 for U.S. rights to his novel, and his superstar agent, Suzanne Gluck of William Morris, “sold foreign rights to 31 publishers for more than $1 million.” As the WSJ explains, “[t]hat effectively valued Mr. Rubenfeld’s manuscript above $1.8 million, not including the undisclosed sum Warner Bros. paid for movie rights.”

But based on early sales figures, Rubenfeld’s hopes of topping the bestseller list may be about as realistic as his chances of catching up with current leader Evan Caminker in the ATL hotties contest. We suspected things might not be going swimmingly when we recently saw copies of The Interpretation of Murder marked “45% Off — Clearance” at Books A Million in Dupont Circle. (See also this reader comment.)

(UPDATE: Ann Althouse has a theory as to why Professor Rubenfeld may not be faring better in the hotties contest.)

More details about Rubenfeld’s foray into the literary world, after the jump.

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Law School Dean Hotties: Your Male Nominees

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yale law school.jpgAbove the Law’s super-exciting Law School Dean Hotties Contest is in full swing. Yesterday we announced the female nominees (click here to vote). Today, it’s the men’s turn.

The nomination rules can be reviewed here. You were free to nominate deans other than THE dean of the law school, such as deputy, assistant, or associate deans. But the nominee had to be a current dean; no former deans allowed.

Please note this slate of nominees is final. Pollhost, which is administering this poll, does not permit us to add entrants or edit a poll after the voting has commenced. If your favorite dean didn’t make the cut, we apologize. We had many male nominees, and tough decisions had to be made. (Our goal was a slate of seven nominees, just as we have on the women’s side.)

You can scrutinize the photos and testimonials for the male nominees, and vote for America’s Hottest Law School Dean, after the jump.

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