Future First and Second Ladies Outshone Their Husbands in Law School

Long before their husbands were elected president or vice president, several of America’s future first and second ladies had already eclipsed them in the law school classroom.

Usha Vance was described as “50 billion times better” than JD Vance in a moot court exercise, in a recent Vanity Fair profile of the vice president which spoke to their former professors and classmates at Yale. Hillary Clinton was remembered as a relentless go-getter, while Bill Clinton rarely attended class. And when a professor was asked to compare Barack and Michelle Obama, he offered an unvarnished assessment: “She was better.”

While the sample size is small, the pattern is striking.

Only four first or second ladies attended law school, long a training ground for America’s political elite. Each met her future husband there or arrived on campus ahead of him. Again and again, people who knew them at the time recalled a similar dynamic: The women were the standouts, seemingly destined to play second fiddle to no one.

The pattern raises obvious questions: Did America elect the wrong spouses? What stopped the women from running and winning?

Political scientists point to several factors, including the male-dominated nature of politics, long-standing sexism and a persistent gender gap in political ambition. Men, research has found, are more likely than women to seek office — including when women have comparable or stronger credentials.

Marilyn Quayle, the daughter of Hoosier State physicians, began taking night classes at the Indiana University School of Law in the 1970s. There, she met and married Dan Quayle, the future vice president under George H.W. Bush.

The couple sat together in tax lectures, but Marilyn Quayle drove much of the discussion and regularly sought out the professor afterward, Time reported in 1989. Classmates nicknamed her “superwoman” for balancing family responsibilities with law school. While pregnant, she even induced labor early so she could take the bar exam.

That reputation endured as her husband rose through politics.

“To be honest with you, I was campaigning for the Senate one time, and someone came up to me and said, 'I went to law school with your wife.' And I said, yeah, I was there too,” Dan Quayle later said.

In 1988, the year Bush chose Dan Quayle as his running mate, The Washington Post reported that stories about Marilyn Quayle’s classroom prowess had circulated for years.

“Over and over, men and women who attended night law school at the University of Indiana in the early '70s say flatly that Marilyn Tucker – a bright, friendly, industrious young woman determinedly bound for a career – was smarter than her good-looking, somewhat lackadaisical classmate, Dan Quayle,” the outlet reported.

Hillary Clinton attended law school at roughly the same time, studying at Yale Law School in Connecticut from 1969 to 1973.

There, she met her future husband, Bill Clinton. The pair first spoke in the library after Hillary Rodham, as she was then known, approached him and said: “If you're going to keep staring at me, and now I'm staring back, we at least ought to know each other's name.”

Years later, several classmates remembered Hillary Clinton, a Wellesley graduate, as the stronger student out of the couple.

“Hillary was the first to raise her hand and almost always had the correct answer,” former Labor Secretary Robert Reich recalled. “I raised my hand fairly often but got it wrong half the time. Bill missed most classes.”

“When we were in law school, she was by far a better student than either Bill Clinton or me,” Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal told a local news outlet in 2015.

The trend continued with Michelle Obama, who graduated from Harvard Law School in 1988 — the same year her future husband began classes there. The two later met at Sidley & Austin in Chicago, where the future first lady, then Michelle Robinson, was assigned to mentor Barack Obama.

When asked to compare the two, their former Harvard Law School professor Charles Ogletree offered a blunt assessment.

“[Obama’s] wife should have been president,” he told TMZ in 2017. “He was great, too, but she was better…She could easily be president, but I don’t think she will.”

Usha Vance, the California-born daughter of Indian immigrants, was no exception. Like Hillary Clinton, she met her future husband at Yale Law School — and, according to those who knew them, outshone him there.

She was “pegged as the brightest student in the class of 2013, possibly even a future president,” Vanity Fair reported earlier this month.

One classmate called her a “rock star.” And a former professor recalled her dramatically outperforming JD Vance during a moot court exercise, telling the outlet: “I gotta tell you, Usha must have been 50 billion times better than [Vance] was at that assignment.”

The experiences of these four highly accomplished law students — all of whom went on to help elect their husbands — raise pointed questions about gender and political power. For one, why didn’t academic success translate into electoral victories?

Michele Swers, a professor of American government at Georgetown University, said that talents that prove useful in the classroom may not necessarily lend themselves to campaigning for and holding office.

“Bill Clinton had certain political skills that translated in communication,” Swers told The Independent. “Law school is trying to teach you to be very detail-oriented and, you know, write successful briefs, which are not always the skills of politics.”

Kathleen Dolan, a professor emerita of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, pointed to a broader obstacle: the longstanding dominance of men in positions of political power.

“I mean, men are much more likely to be elected leaders in our country,” Dolan told The Independent. “They have always been more likely to be elected leaders.”

The United States, unlike 63 other nations, has never had a female head of government and only elected its first female vice president in 2020. Women, who secured the right to vote nationwide in 1920, hold only about 28 percent of seats in the current Congress.

Dolan, whose research focuses on women and politics, said the four women also reflect an enduring “gender gap in political ambition.”

“Men are much, much more likely to run for office than are women. And perhaps more centrally important is the fact that men are more likely to run for office than are similarly situated women,” she said. Women “don't see the value in, aren't interested in elected political office at the same rates that men are.”

Even men with fewer qualifications are more likely to run than highly qualified women, she said.

Hillary Clinton eventually ran for president multiple times, while Michelle Obama has publicly made clear she has no interest in seeking office. Marilyn Quayle and Usha Vance never gave any indication of interest in throwing their hat in the political arena.

“Part of the explanation for that difference in political ambition is that women see a hostile political environment,” Dolan said. “They expect that they would be treated in a sexist manner.”

That expectation is grounded in reality. In 2016, Donald Trump frequently faced accusations of sexism, including for calling Hillary Clinton a “nasty woman” and claiming she “doesn’t have the stamina” to be the commander -in-chief. In 2020, when Kamala Harris was running for vice president, t-shirts sold online reading: “Joe and the H**.”

The gap in ambition has not narrowed in recent years, at least at the highest levels of politics, Dolan said. And Americans have grown more skeptical that a woman will become president in their lifetime, according to Pew Research Center polling.

Still, Dolan said, women continue to make gains at other levels of government. “There are women elected to city council and as mayors and governors and state legislatures and Congress all the time and at ever-increasing numbers,” she said.