Naming in the United States

The United States has very few laws governing given names. This freedom has given rise to a wide variety of names and naming trends. Naming traditions play a role in the cohesion and communication within American cultures. Cultural diversity in America has led to great variations in names and naming traditions and names have been used to express creativity, personality, cultural identity, and values.

Traditionally, the right to name one's child or oneself as one chooses has been upheld by court rulings and is rooted in the Due Process Clause of the fourteenth Amendment and the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment, but a few restrictions do exist. Restrictions vary by state, but most are for the sake of practicality. For example, several states limit the number of characters that can be used due to the limitations of the software used for official record keeping. For similar reasons, some states ban the use of numerical digits or pictograms. A few states ban the use of obscenity. There are also a few states, Kentucky for instance, that have no naming laws whatsoever.

One naming law that some find restrictive is California's ban on diacritical marks, such as in José, a common Spanish name. The Office of Vital Records in California requires that names contain only the 26 alphabetical characters of the English language. There is no law restricting the use of diacritical marks informally and many parents get around the restrictions by doing so.

Despite the freedom that Americans have regarding names, controversies do exist. In 2013, Tennessee judge Lu Ann Ballew ruled that a baby boy named Messiah must change his name to Martin stating "it's a title that has only been earned by one person … Jesus Christ." The decision was overturned in chancery court a month later and the child retained his birth name. Ballew was fired and a disciplinary hearing was scheduled on the basis that the name change order violated Tennessee's code of Judicial Conduct. No laws exist banning the use of religious names and judges are required to perform their duties without regard to religious bias.

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