What Is Going On at Yale Law School?

A decade ago, back when we talked about things besides new coronavirus strains and vaccination rates, there was a weeks-long media frenzy over a parenting memoir called “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.” In that book, Amy Chua, an American daughter of Chinese immigrants, described her efforts to raise her children the “Chinese” way. For her, that meant dispensing with squishy Western conventions like “child-led learning” and participation trophies, and ruthlessly driving her two young daughters to master their classical instruments and maintain perfect grades. The book provoked a fierce backlash, much of which centered on Chua’s tactics, which ranged from threatening to burn her older daughter’s stuffed animals to rejecting a hand-scrawled birthday card that demonstrated insufficient effort. Chua’s younger daughter “rebelled” at the age of thirteen, choosing competitive tennis over concert-level violin, but, for the most part, Chua’s system worked. Her daughters became musical prodigies and successful athletes, who attended Harvard and Yale. The phrase “tiger mom” entered the cultural lexicon and spawned a Singaporean TV show, “Tiger Mum,” and a show in Hong Kong, “Tiger Mom Blues.”

That was the last time many of us heard about Amy Chua—unless you’ve been following the news out of Yale Law School, where Chua is a professor. If so, you know that the discussion kept going. Over the past few months, Chua has been at the center of a campus-wide fracas that, nominally, concerns the question of whether she hosted drunken dinner parties at her home this past winter. The controversy began in April, when the Yale Daily News reported that the law-school administration was punishing Chua for the alleged offense by removing her from the list of professors leading a special first-year law class called a “small group.”

Normally, drinking with students wouldn’t be out of bounds. Yale Law is known for being a cozy place, as far as law schools go, and students are typically in their mid-twenties—well past the legal drinking age. But, last winter, when Chua’s parties supposedly took place, there was a pandemic going on. And Chua’s husband, her fellow Yale Law professor Jed Rubenfeld, was serving a two-year suspension from the faculty for sexual harassment. And, as the Yale Daily News article revealed, Chua technically wasn’t supposed to be having students over to her home or serving them alcohol. Three years ago, when the law school investigated Rubenfeld for harassment, the investigator also looked into allegations that Chua had engaged in “excessive drinking” with students and had said offensive things to them. Chua denies that this is exactly what happened. But, at any rate, in 2019, she was issued a financial penalty, and she wrote a letter to the law school’s administration agreeing “not to invite students to my home or out to drinks for the foreseeable future.”

Everyone on campus knew about Rubenfeld’s situation, but Chua’s had not been made public—only the dean’s office and the student complainants knew about it. Chua was outraged that the student newspaper had divulged a private disciplinary matter. She told me that her Gen Z daughter Lulu, the former violin prodigy, encouraged her to come out swinging. “She’s, like, ‘You have to fight the narrative,’ so I just did something shocking,” Chua said. She wrote an open letter saying that she’d been falsely accused and described a Zoom call with the Yale Law dean in which she’d been treated “degradingly, like a criminal.” She also claimed that she had been barred from teaching a small-group class without receiving an explanation from the dean’s office. “I sent it to my entire faculty, and I tweeted it,” Chua said. “Ever since then, it’s been kind of an escalating nightmare.” Slate, Fox News, and the Post picked up the story. Earlier this month, the Times published an investigation into what has become known as “Dinner Party-gate.”

The question has arisen, in online comments sections and on Twitter, why anyone is even talking about Amy Chua. Who cares about a parenting memoirist’s removal from a law-school teaching roster? The answer is, in part, because this story manages to touch on seemingly every single cultural flashpoint of the past few years. Chua’s critics see a story about #MeToo—because of her husband, but also because Chua supported the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, even after he was accused of sexual assault. Meanwhile, Chua’s defenders see a morality tale about liberal cancel culture. “What they’ve done to you is SOP”—standard operating procedure—“for conservative allies but chills me to the bone nonetheless,” a supporter tweeted at her, earlier this month. Megyn Kelly weighed in, tweeting, “Make no mistake: this is retribution for her support of Brett Kavanaugh, & it is disgusting.” Chua’s allies have also suggested that anti-Asian bias is involved. “The woke academy reserves a special vitriol for minority faculty who don’t toe the line politically,” Niall Ferguson, a historian, tweeted.

Chua and her husband aren’t politically conservative—she says that Rubenfeld has historically been “very left-leaning,” whereas she is a “solid independent”—but they are provocateurs. Both husband and wife have a knack for finding subjects that get people talking, or, rather, screaming at one another around the dinner table. In a 2013 legal article, Rubenfeld pontificated on how we define rape. (See: “The Riddle of Rape-by-Deception and the Myth of Sexual Autonomy,” Part V, Section 3: “No Means No – but It May Not Mean Rape.”) Chua often writes about ethnicity. In 2014, the couple co-wrote a book, called “The Triple Package,” about why some cultural groups are more successful in America than others, inspired by the authors’ own Chinese and Jewish heritage. In a New York Times review of Chua’s latest book, “Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations,” published in 2018, David Frum described the professor as “an uncomfortable presence in American intellectual life.” He went on, “Chua approaches the no-go areas around which others usually tiptoe. The warning alarms burst into ‘WAH-OH, WAH-OH’—and Chua greets the custodians with a mild, ’Oh sorry, was that a taboo?’ ”

On the Yale Law campus, in New Haven, the Chua-Rubenfelds are local celebrities. Until recently, their home was something of a salon: a place where you could meet a federal judge, a published author, or a television producer. “New Haven craves a little bit of glamour,” an alum from the late nineties told me. “Amy was friends with Wendi Murdoch. She’d go to Davos. They have a super-nice apartment in New York, and they’d throw parties there.” Once Chua became known as the Tiger Mom, she even began dressing accordingly. A current Yale Law student told me that, this past semester, the professor wore a tiger-print mask in every class.

One must understand the social dynamics at Yale Law to truly grasp the significance of Dinner Party-gate. The top-ranked law school in the country, Yale is known for being the spot where Bill and Hillary Clinton met, as well as the alma mater of four current Supreme Court Justices. It’s supposed to be more philosophical and progressive than its counterpart at Harvard, which has more than twice as many students, many of whom tend to go on to more boring, lucrative careers in corporate law. This makes for an intense social environment at Yale. “The law school is quite small, but it’s quite riven,” a woman who graduated earlier this year told me. “There’s a very vocal minority of social-justice-oriented students,” who are there to pursue their passions for criminal-justice reform or women’s rights. There are also plenty of hyper-diligent strivers, sometimes referred to as “gunners.” Frequently, these groups overlap.

Every gunner shares the same dream: to kick off their careers with a clerkship for a big-name judge—ideally one of the “feeder judges” (usually those serving on the Court of Appeals), whose clerks often end up clerking on the Supreme Court. A Supreme Court clerkship is the ultimate gold star. “If you get that, it’s like the key that unlocks all the other doors in the legal profession,” a Yale Law graduate from 2019 told me. “If you want to be in the Solicitor General’s office, a Supreme Court clerkship will open that door. Same goes for a top law firm with a huge signing bonus.” (According to lore, the Supreme Court-clerk sweetener clocks in at four hundred thousand dollars.)

The best clerkships go to the very best law students. But the first semester at Yale is pass-fail—after that, the marks range from “honors” to “failure”—so it can be hard to distinguish one brilliant applicant from the next. In this context, a professor’s recommendation counts for a lot. A recommendation from Amy Chua, even more so. “She’s kind of seen as a golden ticket to clerkships,” the woman who graduated earlier this year told me. She explained that when she began the process of applying for clerkships, she reached out to other students for advice. “Every person I called to ask ‘How did you get this job?’ told me, ‘Amy Chua made a phone call.’ ”

Chua’s path to becoming a kingmaker has been unorthodox. Rubenfeld, a constitutional-law expert, was hired by Yale in 1990. According to Chua, she bungled her initial interview, instead landing at Duke’s law school, and didn’t join her husband until the spring of 2001, when Yale brought her on as a visiting professor. Later that semester, she was offered a tenured position. “My perception when I came to Yale Law School was that my husband was a superstar, and all these people were so articulate, and I was the only Asian-American woman on the academic faculty,” Chua recalled. “I could barely speak at faculty meetings, and I was always so on the outs—just a kind of marginal figure.” It took a few years for the tide to shift. By the early twenty-tens, though, “Amy was the most popular teacher at the school, with the possible exception of Heather Gerken,” a professor told me.

At Yale, Gerken and Chua represent two different kinds of figures. Gerken is one of the nation’s leading specialists in election law and constitutional law, and served as a senior adviser to Barack Obama during both of his Presidential campaigns. (In 2017, she was named the dean of Yale Law, becoming the first woman ever to hold that position.) Chua, on the other hand, doesn’t have much standing as a legal scholar. While many of her colleagues—Rubenfeld included—built up their résumés with law-review articles, Chua threw herself into teaching and mentorship with the same vigor that she once applied to parenting.

As a mentor, Chua is known to have a type: immigrants or students of color, usually those who have come from impoverished backgrounds. But she also takes an interest in conservative students—an arguably marginalized group at Yale—and those pursuing nontraditional careers, like business or journalism. (One of her most notable mentees was J. D. Vance, the author of the 2016 best-seller “Hillbilly Elegy,” who ticked several of those boxes.) “I think she likes people who are a little bit of an outsider or underdog for whatever reason,” the 2019 graduate told me. One group of mentees even began calling themselves “ChuaPets.” “A lot of people adore Amy Chua,” the woman who graduated earlier this year said. “They take a class with her, and she takes a shine to them, and then their lives get better. And it’s not just the gunners. She’s also supposed to be very caring and supportive even with weirdos who can’t get clerkships.”

In the wake of Dinner Party-gate, Chua posted sixty-seven pages of e-mails, from student mentees past and present, on her personal Web site. The stories have a similar arc. The mentees describe their backgrounds: one came from a tiny fishing village in China that did not have indoor plumbing; another writes, “I grew up a poor Black bastard raised by a single-mother of two.” I spoke to one of the letter writers, a recent graduate, who is also a first-generation immigrant. The graduate had found many faculty mentors, but those relationships were “more or less purely academic,” she said. Chua was different. “She was interested in knowing who I am, where I came from, about my family back home.” Chua gave her detailed feedback on her papers and insidery advice on how to apply for clerkships. For example, she advised the student to keep quiet about her passion for international law, warning that it might make her a less attractive candidate. “No other professor had told me that,” the graduate said. “It was something I wouldn’t have known unless I had a dad or a mom who was a lawyer in this country.” On graduation day, she recalled, “I was reflecting on what I would have done differently if I had another chance at the law school. Basically, I wish I’d gotten to know Professor Chua earlier. That’s my biggest regret.”

In 2017, the legal world, like everyone else, started to feel the effects of the #MeToo movement. The first domino to fall was Alex Kozinski, a prominent conservative judge on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, who, in late 2017, resigned after multiple women, including clerks, accused him of sexual misconduct. Kozinski, a Reagan appointee, was probably one of the most influential judges in America, apart from the nine Supreme Court Justices.

In 2018, Donald Trump nominated Brett Kavanaugh, a former Kozinski clerk, to the Supreme Court. Kavanaugh had attended Yale Law and was known for hiring clerks from the school. Chua, whose oldest daughter, Sophia—also a Yale Law alum—had been chosen to clerk for Kavanaugh, endorsed him in an op-ed titled “Kavanaugh Is a Mentor to Women.” Later that month, Christine Blasey Ford accused the nominee of sexual assault. Chua didn’t withdraw her endorsement. Then, days before Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing, the Guardian reported that Chua had made suggestive comments to students in her small-group class about Kavanaugh’s preferences regarding the appearance of his female law clerks.

In some ways, this wasn’t surprising. Chua often describes herself as “unfiltered.” A lawyer who has interacted with her told me that it’s more than that: “It’s almost like she has verbal Tourette’s.” I spoke with one alum who took a small-group class that Chua was teaching in the fall of 2017. At first, she loved Chua’s candor. “She was, like, ‘I’m going to be straightforward and give you the real deal about clerkships and jobs,’ ” the alum recalled. But, sometimes, things got weird. There was a lot of drinking, and Chua would share details about professors’ personal lives or the internal politics of who was getting tenure. During one gathering, at Chua’s home, Chua “brought up some weird sexual kinks of a friend she used to spend time with in her twenties,” the alum said. “It was a non sequitur.” The alum wasn’t offended; it was just too much information. “It read to me like social anxiety,” she said. “She seemed kind of desperate to impress people and be liked.” (Chua wrote to me, in response to that story, that “I have a lot of regrets, and that I know it’s one of my faults to be unfiltered or over-the-top or too spontaneous—sometimes saying something stupid just to fill up an awkward silence. I’ve really tried to change—in fact, I think definitely have changed.”)

Another student from that small-group class recently wrote a kind of open letter to Chua, in which she told her version of the Kavanaugh story. She claims that Chua was hanging out with a group of female students at a bar, when she started talking about the #MeToo movement and the federal judiciary. “You went on to mention that a judge named Kavanaugh”—then a Circuit Court judge—“had a predilection for good-looking clerks. . . . You said, however, that you weren’t concerned for your daughter, his future clerk, because she would never put up with that sort of behavior.” The student adds that Chua later said that Kozinski’s harassment “was an open secret,” but that she did her best to combat it “by steering female candidates in another direction.” (Chua claims that her statements have been distorted.)

At the time of the Kavanaugh debate, Chua was off campus, undergoing surgery for a medical issue. When she returned, in 2019, both she and her husband were under a cloud. At the time, Rubenfeld was dealing with his own sexual-misconduct scandal; in the spring of 2018, following complaints of Rubenfeld’s attempting to kiss or touch students and making suggestive comments to them—for example, joking about “tickling” female students, and asking about their sex lives—Dean Gerken hired an outside investigator to look into his behavior. Rubenfeld denied sexually harassing anyone, but, in 2020, he was suspended for two years without pay, which is among the most severe punishments that a tenured professor can receive. Some student activists were not satisfied. A campus group called Yale Law Women released a statement demanding that he be permanently removed from campus. “We do not want Jed Rubenfeld to prey on a new generation of students,” they wrote.

Chua’s connection to the matter was ambiguous. She hadn’t been accused of harassment herself. But some of Rubenfeld’s critics saw her as an enabler of her husband. “She kind of provides muscle for him, because of her clerkship connections,” one Yale alum said. “ ’Cause it’s like, you’re one of Jed’s acolytes? If you put up with his shit, she’ll help you get a clerkship.” Her relationships with judges could also make her seem scary. Slate reported that, after a student publicly condemned a Times Op-Ed that Rubenfeld wrote about campus rape, Chua threatened to “call every justice on the Supreme Court” to tell them not to hire the student. Chua has denied making such threats. She told me, “Many people have suggested that the way I’m being depicted—as this ruthless, cunning, intimidating, manipulative, domineering person—that’s exactly the stereotype of the dragon lady.”

But the perception stuck. A man who recently graduated from Yale Law recounted a conversation that he’d had with two female friends while selecting his courses for the spring 2020 semester. “I mentioned I was thinking about taking International Business Transactions”—Chua’s class—“and it was like I’d said, ‘I’m signing up for Holocaust studies with Hitler,’ ” he said. “The mood changed immediately. They started talking about her husband, and Brett Kavanaugh, and rape culture.” He decided to take the course anyway, although he eventually stopped mentioning it to people.

Chua told me that even though her classes remained popular, she could feel the shift in her reputation. “Everything changed after the Kavanaugh debacle,” she said. “You know, I then stood for something else.”

In the spring of 2021, a few weeks after Chua published her open letter about Dinner Party-gate, a PDF titled “Timeline of Events” began circulating around Yale Law. The document was written loosely in the style of a legal affidavit; it includes blacked-out passages and an appendix with screenshots of text messages. Its author, a Yale Law student who is friends with two of Chua’s mentees, describes watching from afar as the professor appears to advance friends’ careers:

Feb. 3:

John Doe texts me (Document 1) explaining that Chua thinks he would make a good clerk to a competitive judge on the Ninth Circuit and that she “has picked several judges” for him.

Feb. 18:

I go over to John Doe’s to do my laundry. While at his apartment, I hear him call Jane Doe, who explains to him that Chua has just invited them over for dinner tomorrow. They discuss what to wear and what they should bring (ultimately deciding to bring a bottle of wine). . . .

Later on, the author hears a rumor that “Chua has been hosting dinner parties with judges.” Concluding that both friends have been going to them, the author reported Chua. As criminal evidence, this “dossier” is extremely thin. And yet it appeared to contain the evidence that had led to Chua’s not teaching her small-group class. As the document made the rounds, the campus broke down along the battle lines that had been drawn during the Kavanaugh hearings.

The pro-Chua faction included the professor’s mentees past and present. Some argued that punishing Chua would be harmful to minorities at Yale. One student wrote, “We often scratch our heads and wonder how ‘structural racism’ happens, who is accountable for it. . . . Well, this is how it happens! This is it!”

Chua’s opponents included many of the people who had been outspoken during the investigation into Rubenfeld’s alleged misconduct. At the center was the student group Yale Law Women, but there were also outside figures like Leah Litman, an assistant professor at the University of Michigan Law School. Litman, who is one of the women who came forward with allegations against Kozinski, objected to the idea of Chua and her husband as campus power brokers. She told me, “No student should go to the No. 1 law school in the country and be made to feel that their future success hinges on their willingness to get drunk with law professors, one of whom has been accused of sexual harassment for decades.”

As time went on, the dossier’s chief claim—that Chua had been hosting secret dinner parties with judges—began to seem less plausible. Chua told me, “That’s classic Ivy League arrogance, to assume that federal judges, in the middle of COVID, want to fly across the country to be with twenty-two-year-olds.” She did, however, admit to inviting a few students over to her house, including John and Jane Doe, who came over “in a mentorship capacity.” She says that she asked the Does to get COVID tests beforehand, and that they all sat ten feet apart, with the windows open. “They did show up with a bottle of wine,” Chua said. “Since they opened it, I think I poured the guy a glass.” She claims she didn’t drink herself: “I had two cans of Fresca.” She says they talked about law school and racism, and that Rubenfeld was not present.

On June 7th, the Times published its article, which appeared to confirm Chua’s version of things. The story cited three students who had visited Chua’s house, who claimed that “there were no dinner parties and no judges; instead she had students over on a handful of afternoons, in groups of two or three, mostly so they could seek her advice.” Chua tweeted a link to the story, adding, “It’s still hard to believe this happened at a LAW SCHOOL.” Among the faculty, much of the discussion centered on Yale Law’s dean, Heather Gerken, and her handling of the situation. One professor I spoke with said, “I think Heather is wrong. She’s gotten her facts wrong,” and blamed her for listening to “clueless students who don’t know what they’re talking about.”

The voice of the Yale Law administration has been largely absent from this story, except for a few opaque statements, such as “Faculty misconduct has no place at Yale Law School,” or references to COVID-19 protocols. This is because, as a spokesperson wrote to me, Yale has rules that “strictly prevent the Law School from commenting on, or even acknowledging the existence of, faculty disciplinary cases.” Which is awkward, because Dinner Party-gate involves a faculty disciplinary case.

But Gerken e-mailed me to clarify that she wasn’t acting on the claims documented in the “Timeline of Events” dossier: “The innuendo that I made a decision about a faculty member’s teaching based on anonymous texts is false. My own assessment rested on the information Professor Chua herself shared with me.”

Gerken relayed her version of the story in an April Zoom meeting with the faculty. The dean and the professor had Zoomed on a Sunday night. The dean asked the professor what was going on. Were the student complaints accurate? Had she been inviting students over to her house for dinner parties with federal judges and serving them booze? Initially, the dean said, Chua denied everything, claiming that, no, there had been no students and no alcohol. Then Chua backtracked, admitting that, yes, she’d had a few students over, while still asserting that no alcohol had been served. Then she backtracked again—admitting that, actually, she had served alcohol. At this point, the dean told the professor that she was having reservations about putting her in charge of teaching a small group in the fall. Chua responded that she’d never wanted to teach the class anyway, and said that she was withdrawing from the assignment. The dean told the faculty that she accepted Chua’s offer to do so.

This is a different story from the one that Chua told in her open letter. (She told me that the dean’s characterization of the call is “a hundred per cent false,” adding that she had “denied from the very beginning that there were any dinner parties with federal judges and students. As I was racking my brain, I said that a few students had come over, but not for socializing but because they were upset. I never changed my story.”) As a member of the court of public opinion, it’s hard to know how to rule on the case of Dinner Party-gate. One can go deeper down the rabbit hole, which involves analyzing photographs of letters that Chua has posted to Twitter, and arguing about the meaning of the word “foreseeable” and the definition of a “dinner party.” But, as a faculty member told me, “I think the vast majority of our faculty—except for a handful of my colleagues who are older professors—are fully behind Heather. Amy broke the rules about having students over and serving alcohol, especially during COVID. She admitted it to the dean. She pleaded guilty. And she withdrew from teaching the course. It should be over.”

From certain vantage points, everyone in this story looks unsympathetic: the law-school students tattling on their classmates; the women’s group policing the behavior of female faculty; the inscrutable dean; the disgraced Rubenfeld. The most difficult riddle of all, of course, is Amy Chua. There seem to be so many versions of her: the immigrant striver, the iconoclastic writer, the sharp-elbowed networker, the warm and nurturing mentor, and the Hillary Clinton-like spouse—both a victim of and a possible co-conspirator in her husband’s alleged improprieties. And yet, whatever she is, it’s working, to some extent. This past semester, post-Dinner Party-gate, ninety-eight per cent of students who submitted an evaluation for her class recommended the course. (A student told me that this was the highest approval rating of any class she took this past semester.) Chua told me, “You look at the students who are upset with me, and then all of the students who wrote in positively. You’ll see that, in some ways, they’re talking about the same features.” The behavior at the heart of her troubles—a loose sense of boundaries, and an apparent lack of impulse control—strikes some people as charming and humanizing, and others as repellent.

I was struck by the contrast between Chua the Tiger Mother and Chua the professor. In the book, Chua describes herself as harsh and authoritarian. But with the students she’s chosen as mentees, she seems to be very different: supportive and encouraging—almost an ideal mother. (Chua’s daughters have pointed this out, too.) The less flattering accounts of Chua’s drinking and gossiping with students reminded me of a very American parenting stereotype: the “cool mom,” as exemplified by Amy Poehler’s character in “Mean Girls.” In that film, the character attempts to ingratiate herself with the friends of her teen-age daughter by crossing boundaries. She tells them, “I’m not like a regular mom. I’m a cool mom.” She asks them, “What is the hot gossip?” and offers them alcohol. It doesn’t end well. In response, her daughter shuns her, saying, “Mom, could you go fix your hair?”

I asked Chua if she’d ever heard of the film, or the “cool mom” stereotype. She hadn’t. But, she said, “I think maybe you’re on to something. And I know it’s not a positive thing you’re suggesting, but I’m just kind of owning up to it. . . . I mean, I was the nerd with glasses growing up. Completely outsider. I wasn’t bullied, but I was just a studious person, with an accent for most of my childhood. And so, maybe you’re right. Maybe it’s fun to be, like, ‘Wow. The students like me.’ ”