"Good as worker bees, but not good as partners." That is how Peter Huang summarizes the way the "model minority" stereotype plays out for Asian American lawyers: praised for the hardest document review, passed over when it is time to pick a rainmaker. Asian Americans have been the largest minority group in big-firm associate classes for years and remain among the least likely to make equity partner. This conversation is about why, and about what firms, law schools, and individual lawyers can do about it.
In this TalksOnLaw interview, recorded in early 2023, Joel Cohen speaks with Peter Huang, then Professor and DeMuth Chair of Business Law at the University of Colorado Law School and author of Disrupting Racism: Essays by an Asian American Prodigy Professor, about the history behind the stereotype, the psychology that sustains it, and the habits that can disrupt it.
From Exclusion to "Model Minority"
Huang starts with history his eleven-year-old niece found embarrassing: the Chinese laborers lowered in baskets to blast the transcontinental railroad, missing from the photograph at Promontory Summit, and the Chinese Exclusion Act, the only federal law to bar a group by name on the basis of race. He then traces the 1966 magazine essay that coined "model minority" by pitting Japanese Americans against Black Americans, and explains how a compliment became a ceiling: Asian lawyers volunteer for the "most bitter labor" to prove their worth, while the big-picture work goes to others. He connects that pattern to the then-pending challenge to Harvard's admissions, with its low "personality" scores, and to the quotas once imposed on Jewish applicants.
Hot Stoves, Perpetual Foreigners, and Invisibility
Drawing on his training in psychology and economics, Huang explains the "hot stove effect," in which a single experience is overlearned into a rule that is never retested, and the "perpetual foreigner" question ("no, where are you really from?") that marks Asian Americans as outsiders two generations in. He describes the "cloak of invisibility" that falls over women and minority lawyers who think before they speak, in a culture that reads silence as boredom, and tells stories from his own first day of law school and his years of teaching about how embarrassment is passed down like trauma and why he refuses to teach that way.
Disrupting Racism
Huang offers two appeals to law firm leaders, self-interest ("I don't see yellow people on most law firm websites") and common humanity, and five strategies from his book: humor, bridge-building, mindfulness, positive organizational norms, and the art of conversation. He argues that law schools should teach leadership rather than assume it, that teams outperform clones, and that anti-racism is best approached as one more area of self-improvement, like a tennis game or a diet. He closes with Dr. King: law cannot change hearts, but "law can prevent someone from lynching me, and that's a start."
What to Know Now
The Harvard case Huang mentions was decided a few months after this recording: in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (June 2023) the Supreme Court held race-conscious admissions at Harvard and UNC unconstitutional. The profession's numbers have moved little. The Yale/NAPABA Portrait Project 2.0 reported that Asian Americans are about 13 percent of large-firm associates but roughly 4 percent of equity partners, and NALP's 2025 report puts Asian associates at 11.7 percent, still the largest minority group among associates and still under-represented in the partnership. A 2026 empirical study by Liu, Chien, and Mehrotra, "The Bamboo Ceiling in Law," found the gap persists after controlling for credentials. The diversity programs Huang discusses now operate under legal pressure: Executive Order 14230 and March 2025 letters from the EEOC questioned law firm DEI practices, and several large firms settled by agreeing to curtail them, while others successfully challenged the orders in court. The FBI reported 339 anti-Asian hate-crime incidents in 2025, down about 11 percent from 2024 but still well above pre-2020 levels. Professor Huang has since retired from the Colorado faculty. This program qualifies for Diversity, Inclusion and Elimination of Bias credit in New York and for Elimination of Bias credit in other states that recognize it.
