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53 Colum. Hum. Rts. L. Rev. 129 (2021-2022)
There Is No Such Thing as a "Legal Name"

handle is hein.journals/colhr53 and id is 129 raw text is: THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A LEGAL NAME Austin A. Baker* J. Remy Green** ABSTRACT The phrase legal name appears everywhere. And wherever it appears, it seems to come with an assumption that it picks out one, clear such name for each person. So, do legal names as the phrase is commonly understood really exist? As far as federal and most state law is concerned, it turns out the answer is a clear no. This article seeks to highlight the legal, moral, and philosophical wrongness of the notion that people have one uniquely identifying legal name. To do that, we survey the status of names in various legal domains, highlighting that legal consensus tends to be that there is no one correct legal name for individuals (if anything, people often have many legal names). We argue this common notion that every person has a single, * Austin A. Baker is a Postdoctoral Assistant Professor at the Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science (RuCCS) and holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Rutgers University, New Brunswick. ** J. Remy Green teaches at Boston University School of Law and Baruch College at the City University of New York. They are a founding partner at Cohen & Green P.L.L.C. They hold a J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School. Together, we would like to thank Ezra Young, Florence Ashley, Laura A. Heymann, Cori Alonso-Yoder, Carolina Flores, Ver6nica G6mez-SAnchez and Mo Meltzer-Cohen for comments, thoughts, support, and all manners of assistance. We are also extraordinarily grateful to William D. Lopez and G. Kagan-Trenchard for their help on how to approach immigration issues; Daniel Munoz for his help on how to approach ethics issues; Lucky225 (yes, their legal name!) for their comments and prior work on common law name changes; and Brian L. Frye for insightful comments and discussion of an early draft of this paper on his podcast, Ipse Dixit. Finally, we would like to thank all the students in Remy's Critical Perspectives on Transgender Law class at BU Law for conducting a remote mini-workshop with us on this paper. Without all of your help, we would not have been able to pull together a paper with this breadth. And, of course, the views expressed in this paper are wholly our own, and are not intended to express the views of any other persons or institutions. Both authors have been listed alphabetically and both contributed equally.

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