Vanity Fair: What JD And Usha Vance Learned From Their ‘Tiger Mom’ At Yale Law School

Following up on my previous post, New York Times (July 17, 2024), How Yale Law School Launched The Careers Of JD And Usha Vance:  Vanity Fair (Nov. 1, 2024), What JD and Usha Vance Learned From Their “Tiger Mom” at Yale Law School:

Amy Chua, the professor whose 2011 parenting memoir made her a household name, looms large in the legal and political trajectories of numerous figures who have matriculated from the powerful Ivy League law school, including the Vances.

When JD Vance became Donald Trump’s running mate in July, completing his transformation from vigorous critic to true MAGA believer, he left former friends from Yale Law School scratching their heads. A corollary question arose from the professional bona fides and cultural background of his wife. Surely Usha Chilukuri Vance, onetime Supreme Court clerk and associate at Munger, Tolles & Olson in San Francisco, a firm known for its clients in tech and entertainment, is not standing for the anti-immigrant, anti-woman stuff, right? Back in July, friend and strategist on JD Vance’s Senate campaign Jai Chabria told The Washington Post that Usha had also undergone a “shift in views” alongside her husband. If they weren’t in lockstep when they met as students at Yale Law School, they certainly seem to be on the same page now.

The trajectory flies in the face of conventional wisdom about politics, marriage, and the internal coherence of the self, but recent reporting on their legal education puts it all in the context of their relationship with their advisor and onetime advocate, Amy Chua. Chua, a law professor whose provocative 2011 parenting memoir, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, made her a household name, met the couple at Yale Law and set them both on their professional paths in her indelible way. In fact, Chua introduced JD to her literary agent, Tina Bennett.

If one goes by the rankings of US News and World Report, Yale is the nation’s top law school—and one of the starriest. Its list of graduates includes Bill and Hillary Clinton, Catharine MacKinnon, Anita Hill, Elizabeth Wurtzel, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Brett Kavanaugh. Yale Law alumni are often at the center of our hot-button political debates, for good or for ill. Amy Chua has become the one of the most famous professors the school has produced in a generation, and now that JD and Usha are on the precipice of the nation’s second-highest office, they might define the school for years to come. ...

Following graduation, they both got clerkships with a duo of federal judges in Kentucky. During their time there, JD worked on his manuscript and kept in touch with conservative tech billionaire Peter Thiel, who would eventually offer JD his start in venture capital. Usha, on the other hand, continued in the pipeline, and she went on to a clerkship with Kavanaugh while he served on the DC circuit of the Court of Appeals. In 2017, she got another clerkship with Justice John Roberts. ...

In a 2020 essay for The Lamp, JD wrote that he had totally lost interest in practicing law by 2011. Still, he drew both moral support and a book agent’s contact information from his relationship with Chua. In July, The New York Times reported that, after reading Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, JD emailed Chua with a 20-page collection of musings about his own childhood and his mother’s struggles with drug addiction. Later, his final paper for her course called International Business Transactions was a 60-page work that “used his family’s story to discuss the ills befalling working-class white people, and infused personal stories with political theory.”

Chua decided his grand theory wasn’t working, but the approach wasn’t totally out of the blue, considering the subjects she decided to cover in the course. “I use it to talk about the issues of political tribes, but I introduce my own concepts,” she said of the class on a 2022 episode of The Purple Principle podcast. “I have found that if I just avoid certain kinds of traps or certain patterns, I can actually generate a great conversation across the political divide.”

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