Tag: Jed Rubenfeld

A top professor at Yale Law School who strongly endorsed supreme court nominee Brett Kavanaugh as a “mentor to women” privately told a group of law students last year that it was “not an accident” that Kavanaugh’s female law clerks all “looked like models” and would provide advice to students about their physical appearance if they wanted to work for him, the Guardian has learned. Yale provided Kavanaugh with many of the judge’s clerks over the years, and Chua played an outsized role in vetting the clerks who worked for him. One source said that in at least one case, a law student was so put off by Chua’s advice about how she needed to look, and its implications, that she decided not to pursue a clerkship with Kavanaugh, a powerful member of the judiciary who had a formal role in vetting clerks who served in the US supreme court. [Rubenfeld] told me, 'Kavanaugh hires women with a certain look'. However, the remarks from Chua and Rubenfeld raise questions about why the couple believed it was important to emphasize the students’ physical appearance when discussing jobs with Kavanaugh. Chua allegedly told the students that it was “no accident” that Kavanaugh’s female clerks “looked like models”. A Yale Law School official said in an emailed statement: “This is the first we have heard claims that Professor Chua coached students to look ‘like models’. We will look into these claims promptly, taking into account the fact that Professor Chua is currently unreachable due to serious illness. The couple have hired a well-known crisis communications expert but he did not respond to specific questions from the Guardian about Chua’s remarks or the internal investigation. “There is good reason so many of them have gone on to supreme court clerkships; he only hires those who are extraordinarily qualified.

In her new book, Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations, Chua argues that identity politics and tribalism, and the way they feed off one another, are weakening America. The reason there’s so much turmoil right now is because there’s always been all of these group identities and tribalism underneath, but we never heard about them because for almost 200 years the country was dominated economically, politically, and culturally by a white majority. A study shows that two-thirds of working class [white] Americans feel that whites are more discriminated against than minorities. Ironically—talk about tribalism—it’s the progressives, it’s the liberals, it’s all my students, it’s me, it’s the people you and I probably know who are criticizing capitalism, who support Bernie, who say, “We need to fight inequality.” A lot of poorer Americans of all races love the American dream. And in your book the way you phrase that is, “It may seem absurd to some.” And then you go on to say that a lot of whites feel that way. Because I feel like one of the things that you’re doing when you talk about this is you’re being—I don’t want to say being politically correct—but you’re tiptoeing around this group instead of saying things that they don’t want to hear. At the same time, we have to tiptoe around the way we talk about average Americans and white Americans who voted for Trump. But your analysis of why Trump has support and why people look up to him the way they don’t other rich people: I don’t entirely disagree objectively, but my attitude is principally not, “Well, the left needs to be better about identity politics,” but rather that we should criticize the people and institutions, like Fox News, exploiting identity politics to get people to vote for racists. I looked up Black Lives Matter, which you point out in the book that you think sometimes doesn’t speak for all people the way Martin Luther King did, capturing their ideals. It’s not as important a thing, but all my life, I’ve felt like, “Why are these people, these liberals, white people, talking like they’re helping me?” I don’t want their help.