Surbhi Bharadwaj

Georgia State Sen. Josh McLaurin LAW ’14 never imagined he would see his roommate, JD Vance LAW ’13, alongside Donald Trump on the Republican ticket.

Just over a decade before his vice presidential candidacy, Vance graduated from Yale Law School. There, he was well-liked among students across the political spectrum and wanted to be a “moderating influence,” his classmates recalled. As a student, Vance facilitated a reading group, sent spirited emails to his classmates, adventured on road trips and hikes, and met his future wife, Usha Chilukuri Vance ’07 LAW ’13.

Though the roommates did not become close friends, McLaurin said he respected Vance’s intellectual rigor and open-minded curiosity.

“I really believed that he had the potential to reshape conservative politics,” McLaurin told the News. “He was not just parroting Republican Party talking points. He was really his own thinker, and he had modesty about his own thoughts.”

Since graduating, the Vances have separated themselves from the institution and skipped reunions, according to a classmate who took a seminar with JD Vance, who will be referred to as H. for clarity. In a speech titled “The Universities are the Enemy” at the 2021 National Conservatism Conference, Vance mentioned his stint at Yale to a chorus of boos from his audience. He bemoaned the institution’s “liberal bias” and decried it as “totalitarian.” 

Former classmates say Vance’s views have changed since he left Yale. They disagree on whether this change of opinion was genuine and productive or a recalibration to the “winning team.” 

The News talked with YLS professors and Vance’s former classmates about his time at Yale. Three classmates to whom the News spoke requested anonymity to speak freely due to employment concerns.

Vance’s press team did not respond to multiple requests for comment. 

An outsider in an insider institution

Vance grew up in a poor household in Appalachia, an origin story that serves as the thesis of his 2016 memoir “Hillbilly Elegy.” In the book, Vance outlines his turbulent childhood, his time serving in the Marines and his G.I. bill-sponsored education at Ohio State University.

Eventually, he made his way to New Haven where he studied for three years at Yale Law School. 

“Yale Law is a very conservative institution in the sense that it’s very protective of its place as a kind of breeding ground for the world’s leaders,” said Robert Cobbs LAW ’13. “It values that reputation more than it cares whether those leaders are any good.”

In “Hillbilly Elegy,” he writes of the institution with awe, describing it as a “nerd Hollywood” of towering neo-Gothic architecture. Vance recalls feeling like a perpetual outsider at Yale, largely because of his rural working-class background.

“Maybe, with my Southern drawl and lack of a family pedigree, I felt like I needed proof that I belonged at Yale,” he writes in his book.

A Yale Law School ’13 class picture features JD and Usha Vance in the top left region. Photo obtained through an anonymous source.

Alumni who studied alongside Vance also noted the institution’s emphasis on status and prestige. Ryan Thoreson LAW ’14 said that at that time, Yale Law School felt “more insular.”

Classes at the Law School were not particularly competitive due to forgiving grading systems and an emphasis on small-group collaboration, several alumni said. These priorities, however, underlined the pressure to distinguish oneself outside the classroom through networking.

In “Hillbilly Elegy,” Vance writes that his background made him feel particularly ostracized in these non-classroom spaces at Yale. For example, Vance describes in one scene a “nine utensil” recruiting dinner.

The 2013-14 Yale Law School Bulletin wrote that approximately three-quarters of the student body received some sort of financial assistance.

“My experience was that almost everybody’s got something to make them feel less than confident,” said Lea Brilmayer, a professor emeritus of law who taught a first-year contract class at the law school. “There’s one in a million that just aces everything, but nobody really feels like they ace everything. Everybody’s insecure.”

However, according to Charles Tyler LAW ’13, many students at Yale Law School hailed from wealthy families, often with distinguished parents, which explains what Tyler calls the cultural “dislocation” Vance described in the book. The law school experience “heavily [depended] on insider information and networks,” and students who went to elite undergraduate institutions “had a distinction very early on,” Tyler added. 

McLaurin believes that Yale Law School, whether accidentally or intentionally, might exacerbate the perceived outsiderness of people who already feel excluded.

In “Hillbilly Elegy,” Vance recalls a story in which a professor said that students not from schools such as Harvard, Yale, Stanford and Princeton require “remedial education” and should not be accepted to the law school.

According to McLaurin, it was Paul Kahn, a professor of law and the humanities at Yale Law School, whom Vance referenced in the anecdote. Kahn wrote to the News that “JD Vance, at one point in his first term, did believe these were my views, and he was quite upset about it.” 

However, Kahn wrote that he actually does not believe this, which he explained to Vance, and the two eventually had a good relationship. Vance became Kahn’s teaching assistant and house sitter. 

“I don’t think he would have done this had he continued to think these were my views,” Kahn wrote.

Vance also writes of the Yale Law Journal, the school’s prestigious student-run law review, with the same sense of mythology that he attributes to the institution itself. Like in other non-curricular spaces at Yale, Vance felt he lacked the insider knowledge of many of his classmates. 

“The entire process was a black box,” Vance wrote. “And no one I knew had the key.”

Alumni explained that admission into the journal entailed a rigorous bluebook exam as well as a short essay component, necessitating the study of a universal legal citation system. Students could also be admitted by writing for the journal.

But Robert Cobbs LAW ’13 mentioned that, while the journal was a “presumptive criterion for a chunk of prestigious clerkships,” not everyone was interested in participating. 

“It’s as mythic as you let it be. Nobody has to go on the Yale Law Journal to get a job,” Professor Brilmayer echoed.

In the October 2012 edition of the journal, Vance was one of around 60 editors, a non-leadership role that required checking citations. His future wife, on the other hand, was the executive developmental editor of the same volume. H. described her as “Ms. YLJ.”

“A kind, unassuming friend” and Usha’s “smitten” boyfriend

Vance was a law student who “wanted to be a kind of moderating influence, or a translator, between the angry, crazy side of the Republican party and everyone else,” according to a second former law school classmate.

He befriended classmates with a broad range of political outlooks. James Eimers LAW ’14, who met him at an admitted students program prior to law school, wrote to the News that Vance “genuinely cares about the people around him.” 

Eimers wrote that he knew JD Vance as “a kind, unassuming friend who had no trouble bridging seemingly disparate social groups.”

“During his own search for summer work, he came across a clerkship opportunity on the Senate Judiciary Committee,” Eimers wrote. “Despite the very limited number of positions available, he didn’t hesitate to send it my way and give me his thoughts on the application process, lowering his own chances of acceptance to the program as a result.”

Ultimately, Eimers said that the two both received offers and worked together that summer.

In an email obtained by the News, JD Vance advertises puppysitting to his classmates.

Vance frequently used the Wall, an email list server that blasted messages to the Yale Law School community. He would offer to sell Usha Vance’s Megabus tickets, ask if anyone would lend a law book for an exam, complain about the IRS or request a puppy sitter.

At Yale, Vance was “quite smitten” with his then-girlfriend, Usha Chilukuri, Tyler said. The Vances married a year after graduating from law school.

Usha Vance studied history at Yale as an undergraduate, was a Yale-China fellow and earned a Gates-Cambridge fellowship before returning to Yale for her law degree. 

In 2006, Yale’s tabloid magazine Rumpus featured Usha Vance in their annual “Most Beautiful People” edition, writing that “most of her liaisons have been tall, handsome, and conservative (though she herself is of the left-ish political persuasion).”

Usha Vance, then Chilukuri, was featured in Yale’s tabloid magazine Rumpus’ “Most Beautiful People” edition in February 2006. Courtesy of Yale Rumpus.

H., who mentioned the Vances’ distancing from the institution, said that though Usha Vance identified as a liberal, she was willing to clerk for a conservative judge for reasons of career advancement — something not many of her peers were willing to do, and something that set her apart for success, he said. She clerked for several judges after law school, including Justice Brett Kavanaugh ’87 LAW ’90.

H. wrote that JD and Usha were “joined at the hip.” Tyler said the two spent much of their time together and mentioned that during long weekends, he would join them to visit local farms or go hiking. In “Hillbilly Elegy,” JD Vance calls Usha Vance his “Yale spirit guide.”

Recalibrating political views

While classmates’ opinions on Vance’s character differed, many agreed that he has politically changed since his time at Yale. 

Vance’s political orientation was no secret, Tyler said.

Vance facilitated a reading group on social decline in white America. According to an email obtained by the News, the syllabus included books and articles like Allen Batteau’s “The Invention of Appalachia” and “About Men: Whites Without Money” — a theme that arises in much of Vance’s writing and political platform.

In an email obtained through an anonymous source, JD Vance advertises a reading group about the white working class through the Wall, an email list-serve that blasted messages to the Yale Law School community.

Since graduating, Vance has worked in corporate law and venture capital. Throughout his early public appearances, he was a vocal Trump critic, and even called himself a “Never Trump guy” in a 2016 interview with Charlie Rose. 

McLaurin and Vance fell out of touch after their time as roommates. But, looking for an opinion from a conservative whom he respected, McLaurin contacted Vance in 2016 to ask about his perspective on Trump, then a presidential candidate.

McLaurin said that he reached out because Vance was “a genuinely curious person, and other than cynical, sarcastic humor about the school that featured in a lot of group hangouts, he was a good roommate.”

H., who took Kavanaugh’s National Security and Foreign Relations seminar with JD Vance, said that running for office has been something that the Vances have “had in the works” since their time at the law school.

During his campaign for Ohio Senator in 2022, Vance courted and won Trump’s endorsement. 

Ahead of Vance’s run for Senate, in which Trump’s endorsement helped him secure the Republican nomination, McLaurin revealed messages from that exchange, in which Vance wrote that he goes “back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler.”

One of Vance’s close friends from Yale described his shift towards Trump as a productive change of opinion, saying that he was “proven wrong” about Trump. “If you don’t change views as you learn things, you’re a pretty shitty candidate,” he said, maintaining that Vance has always been “for the little guy.”

McLaurin, however, said that “maybe you could understand his criticisms of Trump as an audition to be one of the foremost voices condemning Trump.” Once Trump won, McLaurin said, “Obviously he had been on the wrong horse, and he needed to completely recalibrate so he could be on whatever the winning team was.”

McLaurin called Vance cynical. Vance has condemned the smugness of “elites,” McLaurin said, yet he has profited enormously from connections forged at Yale, including with billionaire Peter Thiel, whom he met at the event at the law school. Vance later wrote that Thiel’s talk was “the most significant moment” of his time at Yale. 

Tyler, on the other hand, views Vance’s shift as part of a broader contextual shift. “One thing that’s hard to disentangle is that the Republican Party itself is so radically different today than it was back then,” Tyler said.

“He was always a conservative,” Tyler told the News. “That was always quite clear. But what conservatism meant for him then, and what it means for him now, I think has changed.”

If elected, Vance would be the fourth U.S. vice president who graduated from Yale. 

Correction, Oct. 29: This article was updated to clarify that “dislocation” was used describe Vance’s book, but not in the book itself. 

HUDSON WARM
Hudson Warm writes for the Investigations desk and previously covered Faculty and Academics. She is a second-year in Morse studying Humanities.