Talk:Legal name

Random Strings?

Are the alpha-numerical strings random (as in vandalism) or are they references to something?

Either way they are distracting and confusing, and should be removed.

--CairoTasogare 18:46, 5 August 2006 (UTC)

What constitutes a legal name?

I came to this page looking for information regarding legality of certain names. Are there restrictions on what names a parent can chose for his/her child in the United States? Is there anything preventing a parent from chosing their child's name to be an offensive word, or random characters or numbers?

Is this page the appropriate place for such a question to be answered?

128.208.36.151 08:33, 5 March 2007 (UTC)Fred

Limit

This article seems to be largely limited to the situation in the U.S. of America.

Undiscussed total revert edit - user: Gerry Ashton

I'm a little confused by this revert edit and the brief statement unaccompanied by any discussion. I thought that drastic revert edits like that were, by generally accepted Wikipedia policy, supposed to be discussed first.

Is your brief comment saying that you are reverting it so that the article will retain some anti-governmental slant? Which government? Is that okay here?

Having spent half of my adult life working for the U.S. government, I certainly may have a lot of sympathies for my former coworkers. I thought that I did a good job of keeping the concerns that we as governement workers have to minimally perfunctory statements of fact, but is it that you disagree? Do you see too much compassion for the front-line governement civil servants caught in the legal name vs agency policy bind?

As for the common law citations quoted in two locations, I myself noted that they had to be reinserted as I found that I can no longer recite those case names from memory like I once could. Are those two short forgotten citations sufficient to justify complete revert edit of the entirety of the article? That seems extraordinarily drastic to me.

Most of the expanded information was a high school graduation requirement back when I was of that age. Younger folks don't seem to get civics & law classes anymore. It seems reasonable to make that same information available on Wikipedia - many of them will need it at some point. Can you explain better your undiscussed removal of this article expansion and revert edit?

SpeakKindly 23:39, 29 June 2007 (UTC)

The edit that was reverted repeatedly suggested that US officials at the federal, state, or local level improperly thwarted constituent's right to change their legal name through usage (a.k.a. common law name change). For example,

Agencies often refuse to properly record a person’s legal name, and instead elect to record an individual by birth name (misrepresented as a legal name), sometimes improperly citing the proper legal name as an alias instead. Consequently, and often by policy, these agencies and their staff are routinely abrogating individual civil rights, and further making false official records in the process.

No sources to support these allegations have been provided. That is the reason for the revert.

By the way, since Wikipedia is not considered a reliable source, links to other Wikipedia articles are just for convenience; they do not satisfy the requirement to provide reliable sources. --Gerry Ashton 23:56, 29 June 2007 (UTC)

Of what I understand of Wiki standards, first publication is not expected to be perfect. The second sentence that you quote points out the direct/unavoidable consequences of the common error of civil servants mentioned in the first (and that has ended careers and, in one case, sent shock waves throughout educational institutions across California - only because of the high rank of the affected civil servant). The issue of "twarted" common law name changes seems more appropriately discussed in detail in name change, and so is not discussed here as I don't necessarily see all variances between "legal name" and "birth name" as a "name change" - that is, now and again a birth name gets recorded that is a pure and simple typographcial or transpositional administrative error, among other possible causes for variances.

To characterize the first sentence as "allegation" seems inappropriate. Perhaps you are from the East Coast where (in the communities that I have lived) most of the federal civil rights aspects of the article are considered common knowledge, and the recording of legal name was historically more appropriate. Much lessened awareness on the West Coast of the legal name issue seems apparent from the actions of many agencies, including the DMV publication - which is that they have openly and publicly stated these policies repeatedly, making their actions verifiable common knowledge in the West, and despite specific California statutes. I tried to keep much of the article focused on the basics of fundamental, verifiable common knowledge, even while straddling the East/West divide, and in hopes of its presence helping to cultivate further citations and article refinements. I was trying to keep this very simple and easy for citations that could, in turn, expand content.

The partial (incomplete) citation does provide reference for the first sentence with which you took issue (source provided - publication number missing). There are other agencies with similar published policies, but again, I was only citing one widely known and distributed case, as I was attempting to avoid delving further into the realm of "name change" issues. The heart of focus is legal name and its complexities, but not the processes or issues discussed in name change. Again, it is too much to assume that all variances between "legal name" and "birth name" relate to "name change".

It seems that it would have been much more helpful for this article to have lent a hand in polishing the citation list, particlualry since I no longer have at hand my old set of books on English Common Law. I can no longer make those recitations from memory as I once could from among the thousands of pages of quotable references memorized during my early days of research on this subject. I could have been much more expansive on the core topic discussion from memory, but I was working with the awareness that those expansions should certainly be accompanied by citations that I no longer have handy as they delved into technical and involved issues beyond the fundamental basics so much more well known.

While working to recreate citations for this article, a little help would have seemed much more pleasant than this out-of-hand and autonomously enacted revert edit. So far, from what I'm interpreting you to be saying of your reasoning, the revert edit seems based upon odd erroneous assumptions about the intent of the content, along with missing citations that I noted myself in the article as still needing to be added (which I understood to be acceptable Wikipedia process).

Again, a total revert edit without discussion seems extraordinarily extreme. Why take action without comment and without allowing opportunity to find those citations? I believe that querying after, and allowing for, that time and opportunity would have been a much more appropriate action.

In the case of the comment you've now cited specific questions about, a short list (including California as it serves as example): "California DMV FFDL 05 (REV. 3/2007) WWW"; "CCCP 22.2"; "CVC Sec 12800"; "CCCP Sec 1279.5(a)"; "California Constitution, Article 1, Section 1"; "CCC Sec 1798"; "CPC Sec 470-483.5"; "CPC Sec 182"; "Weathers v. Superior Court (1976)"; "Lee v. Superior Court (1992)"; "In re Ross (1937)"; "In re Ritchie (1984)"; "Lawrence v Texas (2003)"; "Griswold v Connecticut (1965)"; "US v Cianci (2002)"; "National Council on Identity Policy: Firewire (1998)"; "Judicial Council of California: Change of Name: Improvement of Procedures and Clarification of Underlying Law (Code Civ. Proc., §§ 1276–1279.5) (Action Required) (10/2005)"; "18 USC Sec 371"; "18 USC Sec 2"; "18 USC Sec 1951"; "California Office of the Attorney General: Opinion (Lockyer) 00-205 (6/2000)"; "Sedano, Doskow: How to Change Your Name in California; 10th Ed. & 11th Ed.; Nolo (2004 & 2006) & update 8/1/2006"; "20 USC Sec 1232"; "18 USC Sec 1962"; "42 USC Sec 1982"; "Keeble v. Hickeringill (1707)"; Johnson v Greaves (1760).

I also don't understand your comment about other Wiki articles. I mentioned and linked to them for convenience only whenever the text I was writing on "legal name" began to entwine with "name change" issues, or mentioned those other topics. Did you construe those links as reference citations? That was not at all the intent.

SpeakKindly 04:46, 2 July 2007 (UTC)

My position is that Wikipedia editors have no right to use this medium to make unsourced allegations against living persions, whether they are named, or merely described by the government positions they hold, and any such unsupported allegations should be removed at once. Why not work on the article in your sandbox until the accusations are sourced? --Gerry Ashton 17:42, 2 July 2007 (UTC)

Assumed name vs. common law name change

In a series of two edits User:Jfromcanada reworded the section about common law name change in the USA. I'm concerned that two potentially different concepts are being conflated in this passage.

First, there is the concept of a common law name change. Once carried out, why wouldn't the new name be the person's true name?

Second, there is the concept of an assumed name. On possible meaning for this phrase is a name used for business, which is used in parallel with the person's "true name" (whatever that is). The assumed name is often registered with state or local authorities. An example of an assumed name would be a plumber who operates an unincorporated business under the name "Joe's Plumbing".

I think first we should sort out the real situation, then find out which of the references in the article actually support what we find, and finally rewrite the passage accordingly. --Jc3s5h (talk) 13:40, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

Assumed name is the same as common law name. The article erroneously states "though assumed names are often not considered the person's technically true name". This is incorrect. An assumed name is your legal name. You can get a passport in your assumed name. 112.198.79.135 (talk) 03:45, 17 October 2015 (UTC)

Swedish name

The passage about the Swedish name, Brfxxccxxmnpcccclllmmnprxvclmnckssqlbb11116, could be supported with this link. However, it would have to be reworded to avoid mentioning anything not in the source.

The other links at Naming law in Sweden are dead. Jc3s5h (talk) 21:22, 3 February 2012 (UTC)