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In principle, name changing is easy. In practice, it's a pain in the moniker. According to the legal self-help gurus at Nolo, in most U.S. states, you can simply change your name by using a new one. This is legal, but businesses and agencies don't always play along. In these paranoid, post-9/11 days, Nolo advises you get an official court order proclaiming your name change. Each state has slightly different procedures for legal name changes. The basics involve filling out a form, submitting it to the court, paying a fee, and sometimes publishing the court's final declaration
in a newspaper. You probably won't need a lawyer, just a lot of patience. Many state agencies and legal groups publish name-change information and forms online. We found California, Oregon, and Wisconsin, among others. Searching on "name change" plus your state should turn up local details. Just what can you legally change your name to? Almost anything, as long as you're not doing so with fraudulent intent, such as changing your name to evade a crime. Also, your new name can't interfere with the rights (including copyright) of others, so you can't be Tom Cruise
or R2D2. You can't name yourself a numeral or punctuation symbol. Racial slurs or threatening or obscene words aren't allowed either. Otherwise, you're free to be John Smith, John Doe, or John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt, if you want.
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