Yale Prof Promotes Brett Kavanaugh's 'Extraordinary' Ability To Hire Her Daughter

Look, 'Tiger Moms' are gonna tiger, but the Kavanaugh Klan of Yale elites is getting pathetic.

Amy Chua (Photo by Stephen Lovekin/Getty Images for TIME)

The Yale Law School faculty have embarrassed themselves in their praise for Brett Kavanaugh, Donald Trump’s nominee to the Supreme Court. It’s embarrassing because these august legal minds are not defending Kavanaugh on the law, which is arguably their field of expertise. Perhaps they can’t? There aren’t great legal arguments to be made for Kavanaugh’s theories that the entire executive branch is under the dictatorial control of the president, or for his views that women aren’t entitled to equal protection under the law for their own health care choices, or that the Second Amendment confers a right to own a tank. Kavanaugh’s judicial record is lousy with bad takes, and Yale — Yale Law — doesn’t seem interested in defending Kavanaugh the jurist.

But the faculty — some of them at least — are here to defend Kavanaugh the white man. Instead of keeping it professional, they’ve devolved into the personal. They seem to be shouting: “Pay no attention to the way this man will destroy rights for women, minorities, and gays, Kavanaugh is a really good guy!” The elite clannishness of their defenses are pathetic. It’s not his record as a jurist we should concern ourselves with, but that Kavanaugh “works hard” and “is smart” and “would totally not beat-up a gay person just for kicks, even though he won’t lift a judicial pen to prevent them from being humiliated in the street.”

And now we’ve reached maybe the intellectual nadir of this kind of Yale logic: A Yale Law professor wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, praising Kavanaugh as a mentor for women… based entirely on his ability to hire clerks from Yale Law School, including the professor’s daughter.

The professor is Amy Chua. She teaches at the school and is a member of the school’s clerkship committee. But she’s best known as the author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, a controversial memoir about parenting that comes with a side helping of cultural superiority.

I bring up Chua’s status as a parenting star, because her op-ed rests on that status way more than it rests on the skills Chua has as a legal scholar:

Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s jurisprudence will appropriately be dissected in the months ahead. I’d like to speak to a less well-known side of the Supreme Court nominee: his role as a mentor for young lawyers, particularly women. The qualities he exhibits with his clerks may provide important evidence about the kind of justice he would be.

I’ve gotten to know this side of Judge Kavanaugh while serving on Yale Law School’s Clerkships Committee for most of the past 10 years. It also affects me personally: Last year my daughter accepted an appellate clerkship from Judge Kavanaugh, which was set to begin next month.

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To cut the shock of this cocaine blast of parochial, self-serving assessments of a man who hired your child, Chua throws in some baking soda in the form of a seeming statement against interest:

If the judge is confirmed, my daughter will probably be looking for a different clerkship. But for my own daughter, there is no judge I would trust more than Brett Kavanaugh to be, in one former clerk’s words, “a teacher, advocate, and friend.”

Chua here wants people to think that she isn’t entirely self-interested by mentioning that her daughter will be out of a job. But that line will only be effective on non-lawyer Wall Street Journal readers who don’t know how the game is played. Yes, Chua’s daughter will have to find a different lower-court clerkship if Kavanaugh is confirmed. BUT IN FUTURE YEARS, after doing her circuit court clerkship, Chua’s daughter will be nearly guaranteed a SUPREME COURT CLERKSHIP, which is the big enchilada, from now-Justice Kavanaugh. Chua’s daughter will be at the top of the list next year, and Chua is just counting on you people who haven’t been educated in her exceptional parenting style to be too stupid to notice that.

The whole op-ed isn’t about how Kavanaugh will be great for Chua’s daughter, though. If you like anecdotal evidence based on a statistically small sample size, Chua has that for you in spades:

In the past decade, I have helped place 10 Yale Law School students with Judge Kavanaugh, eight of them women. I recently emailed them to ask about their clerkship experiences. They all responded almost instantaneously. They cited his legendary work ethic (“He expected us to work really hard, but there was always one person working harder than us—the Judge”), his commitment to excellence (“he wants every opinion that comes out of his chambers to be perfect; it is not uncommon to go through 30-50 drafts”), his humility (“He can take a great joke just as easily as he can land one”), and his decency (“I’ve never seen him be rude to anyone in the building”).

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Ten people, y’all. Amy Chua emailed 10 WHOLE PEOPLE and she can tell you Kavanaugh’s work ethic is “legendary.” Again, pay no attention to the fact that these are 10 people who have a vested interest in seeing their former boss achieve placement on the highest Court. Ten people say KAVANAUGH IS DECENT, so let’s focus on that instead of his weaponized plans to use the First Amendment to de-power minority protests.

These are the kinds of crap arguments that have been deployed across the media by Kavanaugh’s defenders. That this crap is coming hot and heavy out of Yale Law School underscores the fact that we’re seeing the elites go to the mattresses for fellow elites, not scholars willing to critically engage with Kavanaugh’s record.

I get it. I get why this is happening. The people Kavanaugh will hurt — the VULNERABLE members of society — aren’t people Amy Chua gives a rat’s ass about. The people Kavanaugh will help, like her own daughter and her own students, are people Amy Chua cares a great deal for.

Who am I to judge? If Brett Kavanaugh came to me and said: “Elie, I’m going to absolutely destroy the civil rights of low-income black children living in urban environments, but your boys, benefited as they are from the privilege you and your wife work tirelessly to provide them, will have a guaranteed Supreme Court clerkship and I will mentor them on how to deal with the white supremacy I support,” maybe I would write an op-ed praising Kavanaugh’s ability to “recognize talent” or some such nonesense. I can see the title now: “Kavanaugh Will Be A Good Massa For Black People!”

Oh wait, no I wouldn’t. BECAUSE I HAVE A F**KING MORAL CENTER.

UPDATE (7/14/2018, 2:25 p.m.): We heard from Sophia Chua-Rubenfeld after publication of this post:

Kavanaugh Is a Mentor To Women [Wall Street Journal]


Elie Mystal is the Executive Editor of Above the Law and the Legal Editor for More Perfect. He can be reached @ElieNYC on Twitter, or at elie@abovethelaw.com. He will resist.