San Joaquin Valley Town Hall

San Joaquin Valley Town Hall

Celebrating our 75th Year

Power of a 'Tiger'

Amy Chua
Tiger Mom Amy Chua

January
Amy Chua

Amy Lynn Chua also known as "the Tiger Mom",is an American lawyer, legal scholar, and writer. She is the John M. Duff Jr. Professor of Law at Yale Law School. Her expertise is in international business transactions, law and development, ethnic conflict, and globalization and the law. She joined the Yale faculty in 2001 after teaching at Duke Law School for seven years. Prior to starting her teaching career, she was a corporate law associate at Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton. She is also known for her parenting memoir Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. In 2011, she was named one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people, one of The Atlantic's Brave Thinkers, and one of Foreign Policy's Global Thinkers.

Chua was born in Champaign, Illinois, to ethnic Chinese parents with Hoklo ancestry who emigrated from the Philippines. Her parents raised her speaking Hokkien. Her father, Leon O. Chua, is a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. His ancestral hometown is Quanzhou, Fujian. Chua's mother was born in China in 1936, before moving to the Philippines at the age of two. She subsequently converted to Catholicism in high school and graduated from the University of Santo Tomas, with a degree in chemical engineering, summa cum laude

Chua has written five books: two studies of international affairs, a parenting memoir, a book on ethnic-American culture and its correlation with socio-economic success within the United States, and a book about the role of tribal loyalties in American politics and its foreign policy. Her first book, World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability (2003), explores the ethnic conflict caused in many societies by disproportionate economic and political influence of "market dominant minorities" and the resulting resentment in the less affluent majority. World on Fire, which was a New York Times bestseller, selected by The Economist as one of the Best Books of 2003,[18] and named by Tony Giddens in The Guardian as one of the "Top Political Reads of 2003",[19] examines how globalization and democratization since 1989 have affected the relationship between market-dominant minorities and the wider population.

Chua has recommended a large number of clerks for the D.C. Circuit. Controversy has arisen from allegations that Chua "groomed" potential clerks for the job by advising them to dress and act a certain way, so as to secure employment.[38] On September 20, 2018, The Guardian reported that Chua and another prominent Yale law professor had advised female law students at Yale that their physical attractiveness and femininity could play a role in securing a clerkship with Kavanaugh. Chua denied the allegations, pointing out that her own daughter was approved for such a position with him. Yale subsequently did not find cause to sanction Chua, and she resumed regular teaching in the 2019–20 school year.[39][40] She later told The Guardian that her classes were "among the most popular at the law school, especially for women and minorities," and that she was nominated for a Yale Law Women teaching award in 2019.