February
Amy Chua

Amy Chua is the John M. Duff Professor of Law at Yale Law School. She was born in 1962, the Year of the Tiger, in Champaign, Illinois. She lived in the Midwest (Go Purdue!) until she was eight, when her father Leon Chua became a professor at UC Berkeley, and her family moved to California. Amy graduated from El Cerrito High School (Go Gauchos!) in 1980.

In 1980, Amy headed East. She graduated from Harvard College in 1984 and Harvard Law School in 1987. While at Harvard Law School, Professor Chua was executive editor of the Harvard Law Review. After graduating, she clerked on the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit for Chief Judge Patricia M. Wald, who was a wonderful mentor to her (and who performed the marriage ceremony for Amy and her husband Jed!).

Amy practiced for four years with the Wall Street firm of Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton, where she worked on international transactions throughout Asia, Europe, and Latin America. In 1994, she joined the Duke University Faculty of Law. Amy and her family loved North Carolina! The only problem was that Jed was teaching at Yale. Amy joined the Yale Law School faculty in 2001.

Amy’s first book, World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability, a New York Times bestseller, was selected by both The Economist and the U.K.’s Guardian as one of the Best Books of 2003. She’s also the author of the 2011 memoir Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, a runaway international bestseller translated into 30 languages, and The Triple Package, a 2013 New York Times bestseller coauthored with her husband, Jed Rubenfeld.