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Notes -
Alabama Code § 32-6-13 states:
The Alabama supreme court has held time and time again, most recently in State of Alabama v. Catherine Taylor, et. al., that one consequence of Alabama Code § 1-3-1 is the complete efficacy and legitimacy of so-called “common law” name changes (name changes done neither by a court action nor by any specific statutory process) in the eyes of the State:
However, the Alabama DMV has this policy currently in force for changing the name printed on Alabama ID cards:
Now, being required to not just “present valid name change documents”, but have a federal agency pre-approve them, seems to be a central case (I'd argue even more central than voter rolls that no-one even sees) of requiring a person to “resort to legal proceedings” to make “the name thus assumed…constitute his legal name…for [this] purpose”, which would make it a “rule [or] regulation…in conflict with the laws of this state” and thus an illegal requirement for the Director of Public Safety to impose on petitioners seeking to update their ID card to reflect a common law name change.
This is not just a procedural nitpick, but in practice actually a blocker for any person attempting the process, because even if you could somehow generate (and were willing to generate) a paper trail for your common law name change that'd pass ALEA/DMV muster as substantiating the change, the SSA will reject it anyway.
Before I go knocking on the door of the ACLU, or spending a million dollars on a private lawyer to sue the DMV to avoid spending $50 on a court-ordered name change: does this argument seem sound?
It does seem like a sound argument, but it'll probably take the ACLU or a million dollars and a private lawyer to convince them. Spending $50 on a court-ordered name change is probably the simplest way to proceed.
Sadly, I already took this “coward's way out” cutting a check to the local probate court rather than raising the matter the hard way, and am now far too satisfied with my legal name to fuck with it any further; someone else with a similar impulse will need to tackle this.
(I wonder if we'll see the ACLU stepping up on this matter only after someone is actually refused a court order for name change... which they generally only do for sex offenders and other criminals whose “crimes involv[ed] moral turpitude”...)
Its hardly the coward's way out even if Catherine Taylor hasn't been superceded by legislation. Which it may well have been. Given that Alabama issues real IDs that seems likely.
In addition, even if you won, I think you still end up at square one. Now what you've done with your extensive ACLU legislation is, essentially, repealed any rulings, regulations, and indirect legislation that enable Alabama's implementation of REAL ID. Now your whole state is mad at you AND you have to pay for a passport, AND you have get the court ordered name change to do that.
Overall, the initial ruling strikes me, given the date, as an intentional giveaway to Birmingham and other machines in Alabama. Partisan and poorly reasoned.
If any federal regulation actually exists which would prohibit REAL ID cards from being issued in a person's actual legal name, when that name was acquired by a common-law name change—and so far this is just speculation, no-one has found any such rule*—then
*I expect no-one will, either, considering that the passport office explicitly allows common-law name changes, Form DS-60.
**I seriously expect these will never be discontinued anyway, because discontinuing them would harm the voting block of “people who live a lifestyle rendering them incapable of fulfilling the REAL ID requirements”.
REAL ID requires you submit one of many documents with your current name, which would be your common law legal name in such a case. But to do that you need to get a passport or one of various other documents that only is issued by the US government under that name, or a birth certificate issued to your name. OR a chain of custody set of documents from your birth certificate name to your current legal name. Those are:
All 5 workarounds also appear to require a federal passthrough document. Basically a SSN, or the equivalent. At this point the other way to Alabama being REAL ID compliant is known as the ridiculously stubborn way.
So what I'm seeing is, there is probably an easy way to get a non-Star ID that is presumably legal under this interpretation of the law, but there is no good faith reason to challenge the Star ID reqs, but you wouldn't have standing to do that, because its cheaper to do the thing that makes you eligible.
I disagree. If the Republican coalition continues to go more working class, maybe, but if it veers back in the 2012 direction without picking up urban blacks, any Republican state would have good reason to end this. Not only would it disenfranchise legitimate enemy voters, it would make the fraudsters that vote using the information of people who dont vote significantly harder.
Citation needed; that may be how Alabama has chosen to implement their so-called “STAR IDs”, but it is not what “REAL ID requires”.
Even if you do come up with some argument—which would be prima facie absurd—that a State-authorized clone of the DS-60 form would not fulfill the 6 CFR § 37.11(c)(2) criterion therefore “everyone would be mad at me” if I got the ACLU to force Alabama to do that…
…that still wouldn't be an argument in favor of the actual status quo of the DMV (I argue, illegally) refusing to apply common law name changes to any ID, STAR or nar.
EDIT: just for the record, your statement of the situation seems to imply that a passport could be used to fill this purpose:
however, this is false (if you mean it as a mechanistic explanation of the status quo in Alabama); nothing on the DMV website suggests that even a person who brings in all these:
would have the requirement that he still first convince the Social Security Administration of his new name waived. The DMV would still refuse Jo in this situation, and I'm just trying to figure out if he could sue for that.
EDIT2: I hate that your point here is somewhat solid...
...since this seems to imply the only action brewing is for some sex offender or fraudster to sue on the basis that he was denied a court order 😬
I mean, why else besides being one of those or married being the reason for a name change strikes me as silly
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Why is this the coward's way out? If it's more convenient or efficacious to do an extremely minor amount of paperwork and pay a trivial filing fee, that seems totally reasonable.
[ For real law nerds, the real question is why does Alabama use
-as the delimiter for their legal clauses rather than.like everyone else. ]Not challenging illegal government authority is a slippery slope. Presumably.
If nobody does anything about undue power it becomes normal, and eventually legal.
Presumably one doesn't challenge the illegal actions of the government unless they are both illegal and have some specific articulable harm to someone.
The harm here (if there is any) seems trivial enough not to
Incidentally, one could make the inverse of a slippery slope argument -- if you cry "fascist" at every government overreach no matter how minor, it detracts from the real battles. Save your powder and so forth.
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I'm filling out this form verbally fellating a judge “praying” that he “grant” a fucking permit for something I (should) have every right to do “without resort to regal proceedings”.
That I rolled over and complied with these (arguably) illegal demands, because it was more “convenient” to do so, is essentially a vote of support for the State to shoot down the guy who eventually tries to make the DMV actually abide by the law, on the basis that it's the "usual process" or something like that.
I mean, that's just a matter of framing. The other way of framing it is:
This is a fairly common way of approaching one's relationship with the world. Most people do not do the bare minimum of things that they are strictly required to do but the things that makes everything the most straightforwards.
It might be edgy to post online about how you have every right to do this without a legal proceeding and therefore that is somehow preferable. My view here is that it's very evidently not preferable in any actual sense that matters.
You don't have to argue practicality to me. I already did it, for all the reasons you name. I was only elaborating in reply to this comment asking why I said that what I did is “cowardly”.
Bending over and doing the wrong thing because it's “preferable” to me...
...doesn't magically make it the right thing.
Suing the DMV would not be "strictly required", either, but if I were to win* it would "mak[e] everything [more] straightforwards" for the next guy who would then only have to fill out an Alabama DS-60 clone instead of waiting for a court order to get approved — so by your own logic, that seems like the right thing to do?
*As a boring tactical matter, I probably wouldn't anyway; I don't have any history of crimes involving moral turpitude, I do have a reasonably well-paying job, and I think my county offers hardship fee waivers for the court order even if I were bereft, so I'd be a pretty poor candidate plaintiff due to the question of standing... but that's just contingent.
It's not wrong in any way to do more than the absolute bare minimum in a given interaction. It is fully permitted (it's even morally exemplary) in most cases to do more than what you are strictly required.
For example, an individual might go to the DMV with 4 pieces of identification rather than the legally-required 3 simply to ensure a smooth process (and to keep the line moving). This is likewise not in any way wrong.
First off, I doubt that. The DMV would likely just grant your request which would moot the case since you had already received all the possible relief that you were asking for. So the next guy would be in exactly the same position.
Legal maneuvering aside, it's hardly the thing to stand on unless you're angling for teenaged petulance. It's unbecoming. Be better.
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I think you're confusing the issues here. The ACLU may be interested in someone's right to change their name. I doubt they'd be interested in a procedural argument. You presented evidence that the Alabama DMV's procedure is inconsistent with Alabama law, and I have no reason to claim that it isn't. But the state legislature could change the law tomorrow and statutorily require a certain process for name changes, superseding the prior court rulings. Hell, there was a concurrence in the opinion you linked where one of the judges said that this would be a good issue for the legislature to take up.
So, if as @ulyssessword suggests, a court were to refuse a transgender person a name change, I doubt the ACLU would press the common law name change thing too hard. They'd probably raise a general civil rights argument and ask a Federal court to grant a mandamus order requiring the probate court to issue the necessary paperwork. Trying to raise the common law issue would actually be counterproductive, the likely fact pattern being that the transgender person was refused a judicial name change, then tried to get around it through common law and ran into obstacles. Arguing that the DMV and whoever else needs to accept the new name based on Alabama law concedes that the probate court was within their rights in denying the name change. This becomes problematic because if you win and the state legislature decides to formally abolish common law name changes, now they have to go back and make the civil rights argument again. They run the risk of getting a victory for one person that has no prospective effect.
Good point, even the ACLU may prefer to force that angle rather than making the DMV abide by the law...
I think trying to go for change in the law would work better because the DMV is not discriminating, it's not that "everyone else can get their common law name but they refused my transgender client". If you're going to work the discrimination angle, it has to be real discrimination.
You mean getting a bill passed to solidify either “DMV respects common names” or “DMV entitled to do what they want”, so that either way we're not stuck squinting at a 1982 court case and trying to guess whether a lawsuit is warranted?
(But I do agree with @Rov_Scam: with the law as it stands, it seems more likely that the ACLU would address a case of actual anti-transgender discrimination by the judge by simply making the judge do the thing, rather than making the DMV do the thing, if only because it would be a more valuable ideological win.)
Yeah. Right now it seems to be "this section of the code says A, that section says B, who gets to juggle the hot potato?" Either go to court so a judge makes a ruling or the state legislature clears this up. What is happening right now is ripe for all kinds of problems.
We are “ripe for” exactly 3 outcomes that I can see: (1) situation stands, sovcits suffer slightly; (2) a lawsuit is filed, probably by the ACLU; or (3) someone opens this can of worms in the legislature.
You seemingly named the latter two as desired outcomes, and I don't get the impression you consider the first outcome to be particularly problematic, so I'm interested to see what “all kinds of problems” you scry here... Am I misreading you? Do you actually sympathize with the plight of a person who wants to change their name, but isn't eligible or can't be bothered to file for a $50 name change?
Or do you just mean that the situation cannot stand, and every possible outcome is going to be slightly problematic?
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My bets are on a transgender name change instead of any other type. They're the only thing I can think of that are culture-war enough to make for good publicity.
Probably only if they make the claim that transgenderism constitutes fraud.
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