Editorial | Jonathan Wardle
Proving Santa You never know when you are going to have to prove Santa Claus. I don’t mean summoning your best “ho ho ho!” at midnight to convince your kids that Santa came. Or wearing a Santa suit while putting out presents in the middle of the night or leaving cookie crumbs and a half-drunk mug of eggnog on the coffee table. And I don’t mean proving Santa in the sense of feel-good movie magic—like producing a miraculous snow globe in “The Santa Clause,” or having the United States Post Office come to the rescue by delivering hundreds of letters addressed to Santa in the middle of trial in “Miracle on 34th Street.”1 No, I mean proving Santa in actual, real-life court work. Take, for instance, the case where your client tries to legally change their name to Santa Claus, only to have some curmudgeonly judge step in the way, as did a Utah district court judge who denied David Lynn Porter’s petition to change his name to Santa Claus (or, alternatively, to “Kris Kringle”).2 On appeal, the Utah Supreme Court held there was nothing illegal, improper, or inappropriate about the name-change petition and allowed Mr. Porter (that is, Mr. Claus) to change his name.3 (One justice did try to play the role of the Grinch, but he could only mutter his complaints in dissent.4) In a similar case, an Ohio municipal court held that a criminal defendant was not guilty of possessing a fictitious identification card where the individual had been issued identification cards and registered vehicles in the name of Santa Claus over the course of 20 years.5 But an Ohio probate court held that a different individual went too far when he tried to legally change his name to Santa Claus:
“The petitioner is seeking . . . the identity of an individual that this culture has recognized throughout the world, for well over one hundred years. Thus, the public has a proprietary interest, a proprietary right in the identity of Santa Claus, both in the name and the persona.”6 Then there is a whole line of Santa-themed business disputes, like when one business claims their Santa decoration is the original, and that another business is infringing on their intellectual property rights.7 Or when one local Santa-themed business establishment claims another business engages in unfair competition by also invoking Santa’s name (or one of its cheerful variants).8 You may even find yourself litigating whether a Santa-based movie (or book or song) is the original or an intellectual property rip-off. Indeed, such claims were made against the two movies named at the beginning of this article.9 There is even a case where the owner of several Christmas classics, such as “Rudolph the Red-Nosed-Reindeer” and “Santa Clause is Coming to Town,” sued to prevent a private liquor establishment from playing their Christmas songs for the club’s patrons.10 All of this seems most un-Christmas-like. But it gets worse. You may find yourself in litigation over whether Santa was used to commit harassment or discrimination. In one case, an employee claimed he was subjected to harassment and racial discrimination where a fellow employee sent him a message of Santa wearing a Ku Klux Klan hood.11 In another case, an employee claimed he was subjected to racial discrimination when a bunch of white co-workers put up an African-American Santa Claus.12 And in another case, an (continued on page 12)
DECEMBER/JANUARY 2023-24 | NASHVILLE BAR JOURNAL
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