Can a person's legal name be all lowercase or all capital letters or some strange mix, or are there restrictions about it? Or maybe capitalization is not even part of the name, it is just a part of grammar for proper nouns, with traditional/linguistic exceptions for names like "McDonald" or "von Neumann"? (This is just a curiosity question so it doesn't matter to me which countries/states the answers are based on.)
3,833 4 4 gold badges 23 23 silver badges 47 47 bronze badges asked Jan 22, 2023 at 23:08 Xiutecuhtli Xiutecuhtli 467 1 1 gold badge 3 3 silver badges 3 3 bronze badges mandatory XKCD: xkcd.com/327 Commented Jan 24, 2023 at 0:09 Commented Jan 24, 2023 at 0:12@JosephDoggie this myth is persistent but a myth nonetheless: "Cummings' publishers and others have often echoed the unconventional orthography in his poetry by writing his name in lower case. Cummings himself used both the lowercase and capitalized versions, though he most often signed his name with capitals. The use of lower case for his initials was popularized in part by the title of some books, particularly in the 1960s, printing his name in lower case on the cover and spine. In the preface to E. E. Cummings: .
Commented Jan 24, 2023 at 0:47@RockPaperLz-MaskitorCasket ". One Cummings scholar believes that on the rare occasions that Cummings signed his name in all lower case, he may have intended it as a gesture of humility, not as an indication that it was the preferred orthography for others to use. Additionally, The Chicago Manual of Style, which prescribes favoring non-standard capitalization of names in accordance with the bearer's strongly stated preference, notes "E. E. Cummings can be safely capitalized; it was one of his publishers, not he himself, who lowercased his name.""
Commented Jan 24, 2023 at 0:51 Relevant kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/… (see 12, 13) Commented Jan 25, 2023 at 8:19Or maybe capitalization is not even part of the name
That's pretty much it. No court would fail to recognize the name "John Doe" in the string "JOHN DOE"; similarly, if someone established or claimed to establish their legal name as "john doe" then the only violations committed by someone writing it as "John Doe" or "JOHN DOE" would be violations of style, perhaps, or of etiquette.
Now, just in case this is related to the crackpot conspiracy theorists from the "sovereign citizen" or "freeman on the land" movements, a few words are in order. If you don't already know about this, you might find it interesting. In general, this is a school of thought that attempts to establish the illegitimacy of government authority by employing a number of illogical and willful misinterpretations of (often obsolete, foreign, or otherwise irrelevant) legal texts. Among these is the idea that the capitalization of a name is significant.
In a criminal case in 2013, the United States District Court for the Western District of Washington noted:
Defendant [Kenneth Wayne Leaming] is apparently a member of a group loosely styled "sovereign citizens". The Court has deduced this from a number of Defendant's peculiar habits.
First, like Mr. Leaming, sovereign citizens are fascinated by capitalization. They appear to believe that capitalizing names have some sort of legal effect. For example, Defendant writes that "the REGISTERED FACTS appearing in the above Paragraph evidence the uncontroverted and uncontrovertible FACTS that the SLAVERY SYSTEMS operated in the names UNITED STATES, United States, UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, and United States of America . are terminated nunc pro tunc by public policy, U.C.C. 1-103 . " (Def.'s Mandatory Jud. Not. at 2.) He appears to believe that by capitalizing "United States", he is referring to a different entity than the federal government. For better or for worse, it's the same country.
One argument used by proponents of the strawman theory is based on a misinterpretation of the term capitis deminutio, used in ancient Roman law for the extinguishment of a person's former legal capacity. Adherents to the theory spell the term "Capitis Diminutio", and claim that capitis diminutio maxima (meaning, in Roman law, the loss of liberty, citizenship, and family) was represented by an individual's name being written in capital letters, hence the idea of individuals having a separate legal personality.
Proponents of the theory believe the evidence is found on the birth certificate itself. Because many certificates show all capitals to spell out a baby's name, JOHN DOE (under the Strawman theory) is the name of the "straw man", and John Doe is the baby's "real" name. As the child grows, most legal documents will contain capital letters, which means that his state-issued driver's license, his marriage license, his car registration, his criminal court records, his cable TV bill, correspondence from the IRS, etc., pertain to his strawman and not his sovereign identity.
(Note that there was no distinction between majuscule and minuscule letters in the Latin alphabet in ancient Roman times; this distinction arose in the 8th century, a few hundred years after the fall of the western empire.)