Dating & Relationship status

In July 2019, at the Edmund Burke Foundation’s inaugural National Conservatism conference, Wax said, “Perhaps the most important reason that the cultural case for immigration remains underexplored has to do with that bête noire, race. Let us be candid: Europe and the First World, to which the US belongs, remains mostly white for now. And the Third World, although more mixed, contains a lot more non-white people. Embracing cultural distance, cultural distance nationalism, means in effect taking the position that our country will be better off with more whites and fewer non-whites.” She went on to explain that her ideas were about culture, and not about race, but the racial compositions of the societies in question led to most academics avoiding the topic entirely.

As a result of these controversies, in March 2018, Ruger stripped Wax of her duties teaching curriculum courses to first-year students.

In a March 2018 opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal titled “The University of Denial; Aggressive suppression of the truth is a central feature of American higher education”, Wax wrote:

Wax has made controversial comments that have attracted national attention. In an August 2017 piece in The Philadelphia Inquirer titled “Paying the price for breakdown of the country’s bourgeois culture”, she wrote with Larry Alexander, the Warren Distinguished Professor at the University of San Diego School of Law, that the decline of “bourgeois values” (such as hard work, self-discipline, marriage, and respect for authority) since the 1950s had contributed to social ills as male labor force participation rates are down to Great Depression-era levels, opioid abuse is epidemic, half of all children are born to single mothers, and many college students lack basic skills, asserting 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 manbeen in a relationship with? 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 manbeen in a relationship with?. Rather, its editors are selected based on a competitive process.”

A petition in August 2017 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. Graduate Employees Together – University of Pennsylvania, a group of unionizing graduate students, said: “We are outraged that a representative of our community upholds, and published, these hateful and regressive views.” Asa Khalif, a leader of Black Lives Matter Pennsylvania, demanded that Wax be fired. Khalif said he had notified the university that if Wax were not fired within a week he would begin disrupting university classes and other activities with a series of protests.

Her academic focus is on social welfare law and policy, and the relationship of the family, the workplace, and labor markets. Wax authored Race, Wrongs, and Remedies: Group Justice in the 21st Century (2009).

The New Criterion wrote: “Dean Ruger may wish to consult a study published in the Stanford Law Review in 2004 which showed that in the most elite law schools … only 8 percent of first-year black students were in the top half of their class.” Robert VerBruggen, deputy managing editor of the National Review, cited papers he said supported Wax’s claims and wrote, “If Penn Law is different, or if things have changed in recent years, let’s see some numbers.”

Wax is the Robert Mundheim Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, having joined the law school’s faculty in 2001. She received both the A. Leo Levin Award for Excellence in an Introductory Course, and the Harvey Levin Memorial Award for Teaching Excellence. 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.

Wax first worked in the Office of the Solicitor General of the US of the US Department of Justice from 1988 to 1994. During her tenure in the Office, she argued 15 cases before the US Supreme Court. She taught at University of Virginia Law School from 1994 to 2000.

Wax then 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.

She next attended both Harvard Medical School (M.D. 1981) and Harvard Law School (first year of law school, 1981). Wax practiced medicine from 1982 to 1987, doing a residency in neurology at 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 (J.D. 1987; Editor of the Columbia Law Review), working part-time to put herself through law school.

Wax attended and graduated from Yale University (B.S. in molecular biophysics and biochemistry, summa cum laude, 1975). She then attended Oxford University (Marshall Scholar in Philosophy, Physiology, and Psychology, Somerville College, 1976).

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