CCJ Directory

Joyce White Vance was the United States Attorney in the Northern District of Alabama from August 2009 through January 2017. Appointed by President Obama and unanimously confirmed by the Senate, Vance served on the Attorney General’s Advisory Committee from 2009 to 2011. She co-chaired the Criminal Practice Subcommittee of AGAC from 2009 to 2017.

Vance’s focus on civil rights included filing the first-ever CRIPA investigation into a statewide prison system, as well as the successful challenge of Alabama’s HB56 immigration bill and a voting rights settlement with the state of Alabama that brought it into compliance with the Motor Voter Act. She created a community-engaged initiative to fight the epidemic of heroin and prescription opiate addiction, developing partnerships to create awareness, prevention, and treatment options along with her office’s enforcement work to divert the supply of heroin and opiates, receiving the University of Alabama at Birmingham’s Lou Wooster Public Health Hero Award for her work.

Vance worked to improve police-community relationships, including through Birmingham’s designation as one of six pilot cities for the National Initiative on Building Community Trust and her work on the Birmingham Violence Reduction Initiative. She also developed reentry efforts designed to reduce recidivism among people reentering the community from prison. Among Vance’s major criminal prosecutions were the first material support of terrorism case in Alabama, the major fraud prosecutions of a Birmingham health care CEO, the director of the Alabama Small Business Consortium, the executive director of Birmingham’s JCCEO, and the prosecution of a man who attempted to hire an individual he believed to be a KKK hitman to murder his African-American neighbor.

Prior to being named U.S. Attorney, Vance served in the criminal division of the U.S. Attorney’s Office from 1991 to 2002, when she moved to the office’s appellate division. She became chief of that division in 2005. Before joining the U.S. Attorney’s office, Vance worked as a litigator in private practice, first with Arent, Fox, Kintner, Plotkin and Kahn in Washington, D.C. and then with Bradley, Arant (now Bradley, Arant, Boult, Cummings) in Birmingham. Vance is a 1985 graduate of the University of Virginia School of Law and a 1982 graduate of Bates College, in Lewiston, Maine. She is married to Alabama Circuit Judge Robert S. Vance, Jr. They have four children.