When JD Vance became Donald TrumpHe was named vice president in July, completing his transformation from forceful critic to true MAGA believer. His former friends from Yale Law School were perplexed. A corresponding question arose from his wife’s professional reliability and cultural background. Surely Usha Chilukuri Vance, The former Supreme Court clerk and associate at Munger, Tolles & Olson in San Francisco, a firm known for its technology and entertainment clients, doesn’t do the anti-immigrant, anti-women stuff, does he? In July, he was a friend and strategist in JD Vance’s Senate campaign Jai Chabria told The Washington Post that Usha, alongside her husband, also experienced a “change of opinion”. Even though they weren’t in lockstep when they met as students at Yale Law School, they certainly seem to be on the same wavelength now.

The development flies in the face of conventional wisdom about politics, marriage and the inner coherence of the self, but recent accounts of her legal training place everything in the context of her relationship with her advisor and former lawyer, Amy Chua. Chua, a law professor, whose provocative parenting memoir from 2011 Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, made her a household name, met the couple at Yale Law and, in her indelible way, set them both on their professional paths. In fact, Chua introduced JD to her literary agent, Tina Bennett.

If you go by the rankings of US News and World Report, Yale is the best law school in the country – and one of the most prestigious. The list of graduates includes The invoice And Hillary Clinton, Catharine MacKinnon, Anita Hill, Elisabeth Wurtzel, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, And Brett Kavanaugh. Yale Law University graduates are often at the center of our heated political debates, for better or worse. Amy Chua has become one of the most celebrated professors the school has produced in a generation, and now that JD and Usha are on the precipice of the second-highest office in the country, they could shape the school for years to come.

Since the New Deal era, Yale Law School has been known as both a stalwart institution of legal liberalism and a hotbed of radicals seeking to destroy the system. So it was a natural place for the Federalist Society, a group that promoted conservatism in public relations among students, politicians and judges, to take root in the 1980s. As Trump assembled his supermajority on the Supreme Court, Yale seemed like a small community where conservatives, liberals and leftists came together, befriended each other and came away with deep misunderstandings about their opponents’ sincere desires for radical change.

It is fitting, therefore, that Chua’s influence produced a book that raised some controversial issues Charles Murray ideas about race and class and gave liberals across America a flawed understanding of conservatives’ true beliefs. But as JD Vance became a professional right-wing activist, he eschewed the even-handed stance of elite law and instead turned to a more reactionary ideology. His rhetoric about family structure, child-rearing, and women’s ambition is in direct contrast to the ideas he may have once heard in conversation with Chua, even if he never fully agreed with the worldview on offer. Perhaps the story of how the Vances got here is actually extremely familiar. Conservative thinkers often become much more conservative as they get older. Many women—even those with advanced degrees—realize that they still can’t have it all and realize that maybe their husbands can.

For most of his life, JD Vance has looked for mentors “who could take on a parental role,” such as The New Yorker Recently he formulated it and he found a particularly important sentence of it at Yale. Chua was actually there at the beginning of JD and Usha’s relationship. During his first semester at Yale Law School in 2010, JD was part of Chua’s “small group,” a formally assigned group of approximately 16 to 18 students who share an advisor and take all of their first semester’s courses together.

JD and Usha were also reportedly among a group of students who gathered at the house Chua shared with her husband, a law professor friend Jed Rubenfeld, for scientific discussions and dinner parties. (In 2020, Rubenfeld was suspended for two years following an internal university investigation into alleged sexual harassment. He has denied the allegations.) However, Vance and his wife appear to have had a very different relationship with Chua. In one new York In a magazine profile that characterized Usha as reserved and highly organized, a former classmate said that Chua and Usha never got along because the professor expected her favorite students to “gossip and drink.” JD, on the other hand, “loved that shit,” said the same friend, and his connection to Chua was more childlike. (In 2021, Chua was accused of hosting dinner parties, apparently violating her 2019 agreement with the university, which included banning alcohol consumption and contact with students. She has denied hosting dinner parties and violated her agreement to have.)

Usha is said to have been interested in intellectual property law, and when she began a master’s degree at Cambridge, she was particularly interested in 17th-century copyright law in England. She leaves little trace of her years at the business law firm Munger, Tolles & Olson, but during her time there she worked on cases related to the publishing industry and represented Paramount Pictures in a dispute with a television network. And at Yale Law School, she was good at playing the game.

Success at an elite law school usually means applying for top clerkships, postgraduate positions in which lawyers assist appellate judges across the country with their research and writing. Usha has done an excellent job in this regard. She took a top spot Yale Law Journal board member and was successful in the courses in ways that were apparently lost on JD, who mentions a difficult academic transition from Ohio State’s academic standards to Yale’s academic standards Hillbilly Elegy. (This could be why a former friend spoke to the The New Yorker (recalls in her words that JD talked about becoming a “househusband.”)

After graduating, both received clerkships with two federal judges in Kentucky. During their time there, JD worked on his manuscript and kept in touch with the conservative tech billionaire Peter Thiel, who would eventually offer JD his entry into venture capital. Usha, on the other hand, remained in the pipeline and completed a clerkship with Kavanaugh while serving on the DC division of the Court of Appeals. In 2017, she received another clerkship at Justice John Roberts.

It may seem strange that a person who has been repeatedly described as “left-wing” or who has seemingly kept his views quiet would go on to work for two of the key architects of conservative policy change of the era, but this is not uncommon at elite law schools. Right-wing efforts to appoint conservatives to the federal judiciary date back decades and have increased over time Mitch McConnellTenure in Senate leadership. On the other hand, a 2016 study found that 76% of graduates from the top 14 law schools considered themselves ideologically liberal. Chua’s success in squaring that circle may explain why she has a good placement record with right-wing judges, despite controversy erupting in 2018 The Guardian reported that it was “no coincidence” that Kavanaugh’s staff “looked like models.” new York The magazine reports that Usha herself took issue with that characterization in an email from the time of Kavanaugh’s controversial confirmation. (Chua originally denied making this comment, but years later admitted he had done so “stupidly.”)