The “Bamboo Ceiling” in Law: Asian American Perceptions of Inequality in the Legal Profession

Shih-Chun “Steven” Chien; Goodwin Liu; Ajay K. Mehrotra

doi:10.7758/RSF.2026.12.3.10

Article Information

vol. 12 no. 3 211-233

DOI

https://doi.org/10.7758/RSF.2026.12.3.10

Published By

RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences

Print ISSN

2377-8253

Online ISSN

2377-8261

History

Published online June 15, 2026.

© 2026 Russell Sage Foundation. Chien, Shih-Chun “Steven,” Goodwin Liu, and Ajay K. Mehrotra. 2026. “The ‘Bamboo Ceiling’ in Law: Asian American Perceptions of Inequality in the Legal Profession.” RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences 12(3): 211–33. https://doi.org/10.7758/RSF.2026.12.3.10. We thank the RSF conference organizers and coeditors of this issue as well as the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and feedback. We are grateful to many friends and colleagues for their comments and discussions, including Swethaa Ballakrishnen, Meghan Dawe, Bryant Garth, Maureen Gelwicks, Jerry Kang, Benji Lu, Priya Purandare, Carole Silver, and Albert Yoon. We also benefited enormously from the research assistance of Tyler Dang, Katherine Fang, Benji Lu, Michael Tayag, Minji Kim, and Ethan Chen. Funding for this research was provided by the American Bar Foundation, the American Bar Endowment, the Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law Faculty Research Program, and several other organizations. Direct correspondence to: Ajay K. Mehrotra, at ajay.mehrotra{at}law.northwestern.edu, Northwestern Pritzker School of Law, 375 East Chicago Avenue, Chicago, IL 60611, United States. Open Access Policy: RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences is an open access journal. This article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Author Information

Shih-Chun “Steven” Chien^a,
Goodwin Liu^b and
Ajay K. Mehrotra^c

^aAssociate professor of law at William S. Boyd School of Law, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and affiliated scholar at the American Bar Foundation, Chicago, United States
^bAssociate Justice of the California Supreme Court and affiliated scholar at the American Bar Foundation, Chicago, United States
^cProfessor of law and history at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, and research professor at the American Bar Foundation, Chicago, United States