Judicial Notice (07.21.24): Lady Maga?

J.D. Vance’s high-powered spouse, a Ninth Circuit judge’s benchslap of his colleagues, a big-ticket deal in legal tech, and Willkie’s winning ways.

‘I come in peace’: Usha Chilukuri Vance (photo by Chip Somodevilla via Getty Images).

This week’s Judicial Notice is sponsored by

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Belated birthday wishes to our youngest son, Chase, who turned one last week. We consider ourselves very blessed to have such a happy and healthy baby.

Thanks to everyone who tuned in for the webinar I moderated about how artificial intelligence is transforming legal recruiting. For anyone who missed the event, I believe that Haistack.ai will be posting a video recording online, which I’ll share with you. And then this Wednesday, July 24, I’m moderating another webinar, a review of the recently concluded Supreme Court Term; you can register here.

This week’s testimonial for Original Jurisdiction comes from Molly Abraham, VP, Legal, at Coinbase: “I love when OJ pops up in my inbox. I know I can count on the latest legal news in page-turning fashion. Life goals now include being Lawyer of the Week.” My thanks to Molly—who’s had a fascinating career at the cutting edge of law and technology, having served as general counsel of a flying-car company before Coinbase—for her kind words.

Now, on to the news—of which there’s no shortage.

Lawyer of the Week: Usha Vance.

On Monday, former president Donald Trump picked Senator J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), 39, as his running mate. Although Vance is a lawyer by training, a 2013 graduate of Yale Law School, his legal career was brief. After a one-year clerkship for Judge David Bunning (E.D. Ky.) and a short stint at Sidley Austin, Vance transitioned into finance, followed by politics—and the rest is history.

The legal world has been far more fascinated by Vance’s wife, Usha Chilukuri Vance, 38. Her husband has described her as “brilliant” and “way more accomplished than I am”—and whether that’s true or not, there’s no disputing that she has a legal résumé to die for. She graduated from Yale College, summa cum laude; the University of Cambridge, which she attended on a Gates Scholarship; and Yale Law School, where she met J.D. in 1L “small group.” She clerked for Judge Amul Thapar (E.D. Ky.) from 2013 to 2014, then-Judge Brett Kavanaugh (D.C. Cir.) from 2014 to 2015, and Chief Justice John Roberts from 2017 to 2018—and juggled her SCOTUS clerkship with caring for a newborn (Ewan, now 7—subsequently joined by Vivek, 4, and Mirabel, 2).

In between her Kavanaugh and Roberts clerkships and again after SCOTUS, Usha worked as a litigator at Munger Tolles & Olson (MTO), where her clients over the years included Walt Disney, PG&E, and the University of California. While at MTO, she was viewed as liberal or moderate—and as of 2014, she was a registered Democrat.

[UPDATE (7/31/2024, 9:29 a.m.): According to The Washington Post, “Records from the D.C. Board of Elections show that in 2015, while clerking for Kavanaugh, Vance switched her voter registration from no party to Democratic. But on Friday, the elections office told The Post that the switch to a Democratic affiliation had been a clerical error.” The Post piece also reports that Usha “was generally appalled by Trump,” according to a friend, as of January 6, 2021—whose events she found “deeply disturbing,” per the same source. But Jai Chabria, a Republican strategist for J.D.’s 2022 Senate campaign and a family friend, told The Post that “Usha has had a similar shift in views [to J.D.’s] and fully supports Donald Trump and her husband, and she will do whatever she can to ensure their victory this November.”]

By 2022, the year that J.D. ran for the Senate, she had switched her registration to Republican. And then last Wednesday night, Usha arguably embraced her role as “MAGA’s potential second lady,” in the words of the L.A Times. Donning a cobalt blue, off-the-rack dress by Badgley Mischka, she introduced her husband at the Republican National Convention. In a subtle rebuttal to the view that her husband, a Trump critic turned running mate, struck a Faustian bargain, Usha declared, “The J.D. I knew [at YLS] is the same J.D. you see today—except for the beard.”

Note my wording: she “arguably embraced” her MAGA role. As Vivia Chen wrote in her Substack newsletter, Usha’s RNC speech was marked by an “undertone of ambivalence”—and she never once mentioned Trump. If you review the transcript of her remarks—courtesy of Rev.com, the service I use to generate first drafts of my podcast transcripts—you’ll look in vain for the T-word.

Even if Usha hasn’t gone 100 percent MAGA, she has definitely made sacrifices for the sake of her husband’s career. Immediately after J.D. was announced as the Republican vice-presidential candidate, she resigned from Munger, putting her high-powered legal career on hold. In a statement, she said, “In light of today’s news, I have resigned from my position at [MTO] to focus on caring for our family.”

And perhaps Usha has already made some sacrifices? Even though she graduated from law school more than a decade ago and clerked for SCOTUS, she was only an associate at the time of her resignation—making me wonder whether her path to partnership might have been affected by her having worked remotely from Cincinnati, where the Vances moved after her Roberts clerkship, or whether she ever worked part-time at any point.

Many observers probably have the same question as Vivia Chen when it comes to Usha Vance: “What is this serious, brainy woman doing in MAGA Land?” Have her political views evolved in a MAGA direction, as J.D. Vance claims his have? Have both Vances been consumed by ambition? Or is Usha not down with Trump, but doing this out of love for—and loyalty to—her husband?

Maybe time will tell. Or maybe we’ll never know. Marriages are often mysterious—sometimes even to the people who are in them.

In November 2011, my husband Zach and I met J.D. and Usha at a poker night in New Haven hosted by Professor Amy Chua, one of the Vances’ mentors. They were very impressive, and even then, years before Hillbilly Elegy rocketed J.D. to fame, you could tell they were going places. On the train ride back to New York, I said to Zach that they reminded me of a certain other YLS power couple: Bill and Hillary Clinton.

Other lawyers in the news:

• In other news about a YLS grad in a high-profile position, but from the other side of the aisle, David Cole is stepping down as legal director of the ACLU.

• In other news from the RNC, Representative Matt Gaetz (R-Fl.) heckled former speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy on the convention floor—and then got counter-heckled, as shown in this TMZ video, by an unidentified “senior citizen” who called Gaetz an “a**hole.” The senior citizen came forward on LinkedIn—and he’s a retired Kirkland & Ellis partner, Richard Porter.

• Congratulations to Law360’s Rising Stars of 2024, “158 attorneys under 40 whose legal accomplishments belie their age” (including Shanu Bajaj of Davis Polk, a past podcast guest).

In memoriam: Neal Sonnett—a prominent criminal-defense lawyer in Florida, as well as a leader in the American Bar Association—passed away at 81. May he rest in peace.

Judge of the Week: Judge Lawrence VanDyke.

How has Judge Lawrence VanDyke never been Judge of the Week? Recall that I bestow these “honors” based not on a normative assessment of awesomeness, but based on who’s being talked about—for good or ill. And Judge VanDyke has been frequently discussed, ever since Trump appointed him to the Ninth Circuit in 2020.

To his admirers on the right, “LVD” is a conservative truth-teller on the notoriously liberal Ninth Circuit, calling out the excesses of his wayward colleagues. To his critics on the left, he is, to quote the title of a piece by Matt Ford for The New Republic, “The Rude Trump Judge Who’s Writing the Most Bonkers Opinions in America.”

Whether you love him or hate him, there’s no denying that Judge VanDyke won’t be winning the Ninth Circuit’s “Mr. Congeniality” prize. His opinions can be “blistering” and “ballistic”—which is how lawyers described his dissent from the granting of rehearing en banc in United States v. Duarte. (Judge VanDyke coined a neologism for a dissent from a grant of rehearing, “disgrantle”—itself quite controversial, reflected in the comments on this LinkedIn post by Cory Webster.)