Amy Chua

Amy L. Chua is the John M. Duff, Jr. Professor of Law at Yale Law School. She joined the Yale faculty in 2001 after teaching at Duke Law School. Prior to starting her teaching career, she was a corporate law associate at Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton. She specializes in the study of international business transactions, law and development, ethnic conflict, and globalization and the law.

Chua has also written two books, ''Day of Empire: How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance - and Why They Fall'' - which examines seven major empires and posits that their success depended on their tolerance of minorities - and the New York Times bestseller, '''' , which 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'' examines how globalization and democratization since 1989 have affected the relationship between market dominant minorities and the wider population.

Early life

Amy Chua's parents were academics and members of the entrepreneurial and economically successful Chinese minority in the Philippines before emigrating to the United States. Amy's father, Leon O. Chua, is an Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences professor at the University of California, Berkeley and is known as the father of nonlinear circuit theory and cellular neural networks. Amy was born in 1962 in Champaign, Illinois and lived in West Lafayette, Indiana. When she was eight years old, her family moved to Berkeley, California. She graduated first in her class of 384 students as valedictorian at El Cerrito High School in El Cerrito, California.

Higher education

Chua graduated magna cum laude with an A.B. in Economics from Harvard College in 1984. She obtained her J.D. cum laude in 1987 from Harvard Law School, where she was Executive Editor of the Harvard Law Review.

Personal life

Chua lives in New Haven, Connecticut and is married to Yale Law School professor Jed Rubenfeld. She has two daughters, Sophia and Louisa, and three younger sisters.