Law Schools

All About Amy (Chua), The Law Professor We Can't Stop Talking About

I read five articles and 20,000 words about the Tiger Mother, so you don't have to.

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Professor Amy Chua (courtesy of Amy Chua)

Ed. note: This column originally appeared on Original Jurisdiction, the latest Substack publication from David Lat. You can learn more about Original Jurisdiction on its About page, and you can subscribe through this signup page.

“Eve. Eve, the golden girl. The cover girl. The girl next door, the girl on the moon. Time has been good to Eve. Life goes where she goes. She’s been profiled, covered, revealed, reported, what she eats and what she wears and whom she knows and where she was and when and where she’s going. Eve. You all know all about Eve.”

— Addison DeWitt, All About Eve (1950)

Over the seven months that I’ve been writing at Original Jurisdiction, I have covered some of the most prominent figures in the legal profession, including leading judges, law firm partners, in-house lawyers, and law professors. Who has been the best for ratings?1

According to the list of my most popular posts, none other than Amy Chua. She’s the John M. Duff, Jr. Professor of Law at Yale Law School (YLS), although she’s most famous not as a legal academic but as the author of a controversial, bestselling parenting memoir, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. She also happens to be the wife of another longtime YLS faculty member, Jed Rubenfeld (and some refer to them collectively as “Chubenfeld”).

Over the past few weeks, articles about Chua have appeared in multiple major news outlets. Right now, it seems that every journalist in the country is chasing Amy.

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Why is this 58-year-old law professor back in the headlines, more than a decade after the viral Wall Street Journal op-ed that propelled Tiger Mother onto the bestseller list? To catch up, check out my earlier story on Chua, or read this CliffsNotes version:

  1. A few years ago, Chua was accused of acting inappropriately around students, getting tipsy and saying indiscreet or even offensive things to them. Her husband Jed Rubenfeld, 62, got in much bigger trouble — suspended from the YLS faculty for two years, after a university investigation into allegations that he sexually harassed multiple female students. That investigation concluded in August 2020, and Rubenfeld is in the middle of serving the suspension. (Rubenfeld denies sexually harassing anyone.)
  2. After the complaints about her, Chua reached a 2019 agreement with the YLS administration in which she expressed “deep regret” for having offended anyone and pledged to stop drinking and socializing with students outside of class. She also agreed not to teach required courses until future notice; stepped down from Yale’s clerkship committee, where she played an important role in helping students land prestigious judicial clerkships, often launching pads for successful legal careers; and paid an undisclosed but “substantial” financial penalty.
  3. Earlier this year, YLS students went to the administration with a “dossier” of evidence supposedly showing that Chua was hosting dinner parties for students at her home — during the pandemic, featuring alcohol, with federal judges in attendance — in violation of the 2019 agreement, as well as COVID-19 protocols.
  4. Chua denied hosting any dinner parties, but admitted that she did have a handful of students over to her home during the pandemic, in order to help these students through personal crises. She said that this was part of her continuing commitment to supporting and mentoring students, especially students from minority or marginalized communities, and they met in socially distanced fashion, sitting far apart and with the windows open. One of the students brought a bottle of wine to one of the get-togethers; she opened it and poured him a glass, but stuck to Frescas herself. She may have served snacks, but not “dinner.” She denies violating the 2019 agreement, arguing that she agreed to refrain from socializing with students “for the foreseeable future” — a period that she submits was over by the time she had students to her home.
  5. In the wake of the allegations about the drunken dinner parties, Chua lost the “small group” class2 she was set to teach this fall (either because it was taken from her or she relinquished it, depending on whom you believe). Tensions are running high between Chua, Rubenfeld, and the YLS administration, led by Dean Heather Gerken.

That’s my attempt to describe, in as objective a fashion as possible, what has happened to date in “Dinner Party-gate” or simply “Dinnergate.”3 This controversy has had Yale Law School — the nation’s number-one law school, alma mater to four out of nine Supreme Court justices, a breeding ground for future leaders — up in arms, for months.

If you don’t like my account of recent events at YLS, well, there’s no shortage of alternatives. In fact, the past six weeks have brought us at least five significant articles about Amy Chua, together totaling almost 20,000 words. I have read all of them, multiple times, and pulled out what’s most interesting or unique from each. For each piece, I’ve provided a “Juiciness Score,” with 1 being the least juicy and 10 being the most juicy; a “Pro-Chua Score,” with 1 being the most anti-Chua and 10 being the most pro-Chua; and my bottom-line assessment.

The goal of this summary is the same as that of Judicial Notice, the weekly legal news roundup that I send out to paid subscribers of Original Jurisdiction each Saturday: I read everything, so you don’t have to. After reading this one post, you’ll be all set for the summer, ready to walk into any Hamptons cocktail party or Martha’s Vineyard clambake and bloviate with the best of them over L’Affaire Chua. You’re welcome!

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Continue reading over at Original Jurisdiction….

David Lat, the founding editor of Above the Law, is a writer and speaker about law and legal affairs. You can read his latest writing about law and the legal profession by subscribing to Original Jurisdiction, his Substack newsletter. David’s book, Supreme Ambitions: A Novel (2014), was described by the New York Times as “the most buzzed-about novel of the year” among legal elites. Before entering the media and recruiting worlds, David worked as a federal prosecutor, a litigation associate at Wachtell Lipton, and a law clerk to Judge Diarmuid F. O’Scannlain of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. You can connect with David on Twitter (@DavidLat), LinkedIn, and Facebook, and you can reach him by email at davidlat@substack.com.

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