Legal Name

Full Title or Meme

A Legal Name is a name that has meaning in a court of law.

Context

Typically a child or a corporation gets assigned a name at birth.

Problems

• Legal names can be changed by the bearer or guardian and so cannot be relied upon to stay constant over time.
• Legal names are only valid in a legal jurisdiction, typically a sovereign state.
• Moving the bearer of the name to a region with a different alphabet will require some sort of transliteration of the name at a minimum.
• So the legal name could be different in different jurisdictions.

Solutions

• User Objects should have a name (key) that is assigned when the object is created, and that should never be changed unless some error has occurred.
• Any other Identifier in the User Object should be changable under the right conditions.

References

• Synonyms: Real Identifier, Legal Person
• Antonyms: Pseudonym