Changing Your Name Can Be a Simple or Complex Task

What’s in a name?

It’s what appears on your birth certificate, your bills and on your tombstone. More important, it’s what gives you a distinctive identity.

For most, a name lasts a lifetime, but for others, a new name may signify a new marriage, a new religious belief or even frustration with the sound of an old name.

Surprising to most, changing your name is not really very hard to do, even without a lawyer.

Convincing Bureaucrats

There are two basic ways to change your name: the court method--filing a petition and having a judge approve your new name, thus making a legal record of it--and the use method--consistently and exclusively using your new name in all your affairs and convincing bureaucrats that your name is what you say it is.

That’s right: In California you can change your name just by using a new one. You also may have to spend a lot of time arguing with bureaucrats and filling out forms to convince them that your new name is really your name. After a few such encounters, you may decide it’s easier to go to court, because then you will have a court judgment containing your new name to prove it.

It is not that difficult to file a court petition to change your name. You fill in a few spaces on a court form, file it in court, pay a filing fee and have your new name published in a legal notice in a newspaper. You don’t even have to go to court yourself, in most cases. There is even a book explaining how to do it, “How To Change Your Name” by David Brown and David Loeb, published by Nolo Press.

The use method is more common than you might expect. In fact, your mother probably changed her name without going to court when she married your father and gave up her maiden name--just by using her married name. Today, many married women retain their maiden names, or at least use their maiden names for business purposes.

Using two different names, one professionally and the other at home, can cause some identity problems. As one woman executive with that dilemma told me recently: “Sometimes I’m not sure what my name is.” And there may be a subtle and slight legal worry too. After all, which name is your legal name? (It may very well be your maiden name, because technically you can’t change your name by the use method to your married name unless you use it exclusively. But I doubt if anyone is ever going to challenge you on this one.)

Still, it is difficult to get monogrammed towels when you have two names, as this executive noted.

Legal Caveats

There are some legal caveats to name changes. The new name cannot be used for fraudulent purposes--such as trying to avoid debts or pretending you’re related to someone else. In one case, a judge denied a name-change petition because the petitioner was trying to pass himself off as the son of a famous actor.

The new name cannot be used to intentionally confuse others or invade someone’s privacy. So you better forget about taking on the name Meryl Streep or Jack Nicholson. And several judges in different states have refused to allow a name to be changed to a number--both “3” and “1069” have been denied by various courts.

Finally, if someone challenges your court petition for a new name, the burden of proof is on them, not you, to convince the judge that you shouldn’t have the name you want.

Attorney Jeffrey S. Klein, The Times’ senior staff counsel, cannot answer mail personally but will respond in this column to questions of general interest about the law. Do not telephone. Write to Jeffrey S. Klein, Legal View, The Times, Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles 90053.