For fans of Operation Varsity Blues comes another twisted tale of privilege. Amy Chua, Tiger Mom author, wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed last July extolling the virtues of then Supreme Court judicial nominee Brett Kavanaugh as a “mentor to women.” Less than a year later, Kavanaugh has hired Chua’s daughter Sophia Chua-Rubenfeld (above, right) as a Supreme Court clerk set to begin this October.
Of course there’s more: Chua is a law professor at Yale, where Kavanaugh graduated from both undergraduate and law school (a double Yalie, if you will); Chua’s daughter Sophia graduated from Yale in 2018. (Deep sigh for all of the hard-working students out there who lack connections.) As the elder Chua announced in the WSJ op-ed just days after President Trump nominated Kavanaugh—and weeks before Christine Blasey Ford came forward to accuse him of assaulting her in high school—she’d gotten to know Kavanaugh “while serving on Yale Law School’s Clerkships Committee for most of the past 10 years” and vouched for his character.
As Chua also shared last year, Sophia was, at the time, already scheduled to start an appellate clerkship with Kavanaugh, so Chua was not—of course not, you cynics!—writing a glowing op-ed about him in a national newspaper for her or her daughter’s own potential, personal gain. In fact, her mother wrote, Sophia only stood to suffer from Kavanaugh’s nomination to the high court because it meant “if the judge is confirmed, my daughter will probably be looking for a different clerkship.” But she added, “for my own daughter, there is no judge I would trust more than Brett Kavanaugh to be, in one former clerk’s words, ‘a teacher, advocate, and friend.’” What a stunning coincidence that Sophia is now, in fact, once more clerking for this very judge, despite tweeting that she wouldn’t be “applying to SCOTUS anytime soon.”
In any case Chua’s op-ed has not aged well, after Ford’s historic testimony as well as accusations against Chua’s husband, Jed Rubenfeld, another Yale professor who helps place law clerks and who is under investigation for reported inappropriate conduct with students. Law students also told the Guardian that Chua told them that it was “not an accident” that Kavanaugh’s clerks “looked like models,” a claim she denied.
“These days the press is full of stories about powerful men exploiting or abusing female employees,” Chua wrote last year. “That makes it even more striking to hear Judge Kavanaugh’s female clerks speak of his decency and his role as a fierce champion of their careers.”
