Amy Wax

Amy Laura Wax (born January 19, 1953) is an American legal scholar and neurologist.

She is the Robert Mundheim Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School.

Her work addresses issues in social welfare law and policy, as well as the relationship of the family, the workplace, and labor markets.

She has often made remarks about non-white people that have been described as white supremacist and racist.

Wax was born on January 19, 1953, in Troy, New York.

She was raised with her two sisters in a Conservative Jewish household in Troy, where she attended public schools.

Her father worked in the garment industry, and her mother was a teacher and a government administrator in Albany, New York.

Wax attended Troy High School, where she was head of the school's senior honor roll.

She graduated as class valedictorian and attained the highest score in Rensselaer County in the New York Regents Examinations.

Wax enrolled in Yale University, graduating with a Bachelor of Science (B.S.) in molecular biophysics and biochemistry, summa cum laude, in 1975.

She received a Marshall Scholarship to attend Somerville College, Oxford.

She graduated from Oxford in 1976 with a Master of Philosophy (M.Phil.) in philosophy, physiology, and psychology.

Upon returning to the United States, Wax dual enrolled in Harvard Medical School and Harvard Law School.

While studying as a medical student, she was a resident tutor in both medicine and philosophy at Eliot House within Harvard College.

Concurrently, Wax was a first year student at Harvard Law from 1980 to 1981.

She graduated from Harvard Medical School with a Doctor of Medicine (M.D.), cum laude, with distinction in neuroscience in 1981.

Wax practiced medicine from 1982 to 1987, doing a residency in neurology at the New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center and working as a consulting neurologist at a clinic in The Bronx and for a medical group in Brooklyn.

She completed her legal education at Columbia Law School, where she became an editor of the Columbia Law Review and was a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar.

She worked part-time to pay for her law school education, obtaining her Juris Doctor (J.D.) degree in 1987.

During her time as a law student at Columbia, Wax received two awards: the Emil Schlesinger Labor Law Prize and the Milton V. Conford Prize in Jurisprudence.

Following graduation, Wax clerked for Judge Abner J. Mikva of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit from 1987 to 1988.

She was admitted to the New York State bar in 1988.

Wax then worked in the Office of the Solicitor General of the United States of the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) from 1988 to 1994.

During her tenure in the office, she argued 15 cases before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Wax became an associate professor at the University of Virginia School of Law in 1994, becoming a full professor in 1999.

In July 2001, Wax moved to become a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, receiving the university's appointment as the Robert Mundheim Professor of Law in May 2007.

She received both the A. Leo Levin Award for Excellence in an Introductory Course, and the Harvey Levin Memorial Award for Teaching Excellence.

Wax authored Race, Wrongs, and Remedies: Group Justice in the 21st Century (2009).

In 2015, she received a Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching, making her one of three Penn Law professors to have received the award in 20 years.

Her academic focus is on social welfare law and policy, and the relationship of the family, the workplace, and labor markets.

In an August 2017 piece in The Philadelphia Inquirer titled "Paying the price for breakdown of the country's bourgeois culture", she wrote with San Diego law professor Larry Alexander that since the 1950s, the decline of "bourgeois values" (such as hard work, self-discipline, marriage, and respect for authority) had contributed to social ills such as male labor force participation rates down to Great Depression-era levels, endemic opioid abuse, half of all children being born to single mothers, and many college students lacking basic skills.

The authors asserted that "all cultures are not equal. Or at least they are not equal in preparing people to be productive in an advanced economy."

She told The Daily Pennsylvanian that "everyone wants to go to countries ruled by white Europeans" because of their "superior" mores.

In the same interview, Wax strongly emphasized that she did not believe in the superiority of one race over another, but was describing the situation in various countries and cultures.

In a September 2017 podcast interview with Professor Glenn Loury, Wax said: "Take Penn Law School, or some top 10 law school... Here's a very inconvenient fact... I don't think I've ever seen a black student graduate in the top quarter of the class, and rarely, rarely in the top half ... I can think of one or two students who scored in the top half in my required first-year course," and said that Penn Law has a racial diversity mandate for its Law Review.

University of Pennsylvania Law School Dean Theodore Ruger responded, "Black students have graduated in the top of the class at Penn Law, and the Law Review does not have a diversity mandate. Rather, its editors are selected based on a competitive process."

An August 2017 petition seeking to fire Wax gathered about 4,000 signatures.

That same month, 33 of her fellow Penn Law faculty members signed an open letter condemning statements Wax made in her Philadelphia Inquirer piece and Daily Pennsylvanian interview.

The Penn Law chapter of the National Lawyers Guild condemned her comments.

In July 2019, at the Edmund Burke Foundation's inaugural National Conservatism conference, Wax said, "Embracing... cultural distance nationalism, means in effect taking the position that our country will be better off with more whites and fewer non-whites."