CLEVELAND — With Ohio U.S. Sen. JD Vance running for vice president alongside former President Donald Trump, we've seen claims pop up online questioning whether the Yale Law School graduate ever passed the bar exam.
QUESTION
A 3News viewer also emailed in and asked us: "Did JD Vance ever take and pass the bar? Searches in Ohio and California, under his three names resulted in no evidence of passing."
So let's VERIFY the answer here.
SOURCES
Our sources are:
- JD Vance's campaign
- Yale Law School
- The Kentucky Office of Bar Admissions
- The Kentucky Bar Association
- The Associated Press.
EXPLANATION
First, let's address the name aspect of the question.
The Associated Press published a thorough story detailing how JD Vance was named James Donald Bowman at birth, with his middle and last names after his biological father.
Later, when his mother remarried, she changed his name to James David Hamel, in part to keep his first initials consistent, as he always went by JD.
Then, sometime before graduating law school, JD changed his legal name to James David Vance in honor of his grandparents, who helped raise him.
As for the bar exam piece of the puzzle, we started with reaching out to his campaign to ask when and where Vance passed the bar exam. Spokesperson Luke Schroeder told us, "Sen. Vance passed the bar in the state of Kentucky."
To find out when he might have taken that bar exam and under what name, we checked with the Yale Law School Office of Public Affairs. Their spokesperson told us, "A person by the name of James David Vance received a Juris Doctor degree in May 2013 and attended Yale Law School from September 2010 to May 2013."
From there, we checked the Kentucky Office of Bar Admissions website for bar exam results. When we checked the exam from July 2013, we saw that James David Vance of Cincinnati is listed as passing.
Vance's profile with the Kentucky Bar Association confirms that he was admitted to practice law in October 2013. That's the standard time for swearing in new lawyers, after passing the July bar exam.
ANSWER
So we can VERIFY that yes, JD Vance did pass the bar exam in Kentucky in 2013. Any claims being shared online that he did not pass the bar exam are false.
And he did it under his current legal name, James David Vance.
Remember, if you see something you want us to fact check, you can send it our way at VERIFY@wkyc.com.