Jonathan Borden <jonathan@o...> writes:

> Michael Kay wrote:
> 
> >> Surely a mere preference, not affecting one's legal name, is
> >> insufficient to activate this.
> >
> >In England if you make a public statement that you wish to be known by a
> >particular name, then that is your legal name.
> >
> What do you do when "the man formerly known as Prince" shows up in an
> office and declares himself to be known by a non-alphanumeric, indeed
> non-Unicode symbol, which he draws on a piece of paper?

There was a case in Israel a few years back of a young man who decided
to change his last name to what would be transliterated in Latin1 as
".com"[1]. His request was initially turned down by the Ministry for
Internal Affairs that handles these things, but he took the case to
court and won on the grounds that no law prohibited using punctuation
in names.


[1] Hebrew doesn't use capitals, and I don't know how the man in
question capitalized the English spelling of his new name, if at all.

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