Factbox-Wife of Trump running mate J.D. Vance is lawyer with Supreme Court ties

By Mike Scarcella, Karen Sloan and Sara Merken

(Reuters) - Usha Vance, the wife of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s newly-selected running mate J.D. Vance, is a corporate lawyer with ties to two sitting U.S. Supreme Court justices. She said in a statement late Monday that she is resigning from her law firm, Munger, Tolles & Olson, to support her family.

Below is a look at her legal career, which followed an arc from Yale to a Supreme Court clerkship and private practice at one of the country’s most prominent corporate firms.

YALE LAW GRADUATE

Vance and her husband attended Yale Law School together, graduating in 2013. She served as an editor of the Yale Law Journal and managing editor of the Yale Journal of Law & Technology and participated in classes offering free legal advice on Supreme Court and media freedom issues.

Among the pair’s Yale Law classmates was businessman Vivek Ganapathy Ramaswamy, who ran unsuccessfully for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.

CLERK FOR JUSTICE ROBERTS

Usha Vance was a law clerk to Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts during the 2017-2018 term, holding one of four coveted slots in his chambers. Law clerks help research cases and write drafts of decisions.

Roberts during that term authored a 5-4 ruling upholding Trump's travel ban targeting several Muslim-majority countries. In another ruling, Roberts was in the 7-2 majority that backed a Christian baker who refused to make a wedding cake for a gay couple.

Vance earlier was a law clerk in Kentucky for now-6th U.S. Circuit Judge Amul Thapar, who Trump once considered for a Supreme Court vacancy. In 2014, she clerked on the influential D.C. Circuit for Brett Kavanaugh, who was nominated by Trump and confirmed to the Supreme Court in 2018.

CORPORATE LITIGATOR

At the 200-lawyer Munger firm, Vance, an associate, focused on civil litigation and appeals, according to an online biography that is now removed from the firm’s website.

The firm, whose founders include the late Charlie Munger, has counted Berkshire Hathaway, Bank of America, and PG&E among its clients.

Vance’s own clients there included a division of the Walt Disney Company and the Regents of the University of California, court records show.

A Munger spokesman on Monday said Vance had been an "excellent lawyer and colleague." Douglas Emhoff, husband of Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris, left his job at law firm DLA Piper days after the 2020 election.

(Reporting by Mike Scarcella; Editing by David Bario and Rod Nickel)