Why Are Anonymous People Called “John Doe” in Legal Matters?

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name is Zach from Tallahassee, Florida.

I just had a question about John Doe.

No idea where that name came from.

It just seems like a funky name to pick out of the blue for an unnamed person.

Where did you pick it up? Why did it come to mind?

Curiosity, I guess.

It is a strange one, and what’s even stranger is how far back it goes, at least to the 1300s.

Wow.

Part of English law, kind of based on the Magna Carta, which was, if you remember, set up in 1215, the year 1215.

And there was a need there specifically for witnesses for certain kinds of legal action.

And what happened is by the 1300, there’s a certain kind of land-related legal matter that basically evolved getting your land back, where in order to do it most expeditiously, the John Doe and the name Richard Rowe, R-O-E, were used to make the case with minimal fuss.

So John Doe was used for the plaintiff, the person bringing the suit, and Richard Rowe was used as the defendant.

And sometimes these names were used for witnesses.

And what it meant was that this case could just like kind of sail through the legal process, because no real witnesses or defendants were actually named or called.

No evidence was being given, and the person who should have been named as the defendant wasn’t there to respond.

It was kind of this fishy, scammy way of winning a case because if the person you’re suing doesn’t know that you’re suing them and you’re using a pseudonym for them in the legal documents, then how are they going to appear to defend themselves?

Wow. I didn’t realize it had such a shady origin.

Oh, totally shady.

I guess, do you have any idea why it was still, I mean, still like Richard Rowe and John Doe?

Oh, yeah, and there are more names, too, and I’ll get to those in a minute.

Well, that whole, the loophole was basically closed in the mid-1800s in England, and we inherit a lot of our legal basis from England.

And so those names stuck around, though, to fill in kind of the gap when you don’t know the name of a person, or in order to give them safety or security, you just use John Doe or Richard Rowe in place of their real names, even if you do actually know their names, so that other people can’t pressure them if they’re witnesses or do something evil to them so that they won’t actually continue their suit.

Of course, Jane Doe and Jane Rowe are now used now that women have the right to bring suits.

But there were other names too, like Peter Poe, P-O-E, which we don’t use anymore.

And if you look in legal books and documents written in Latin from the 1600s, you’ll find these names and more.

So John Doe there is often spelled D-O-O, and Richard Rowe is R-O-O.

There’s also John Den and Richard Fenn.

And sometimes they’re very Latinized as Johannemdu and Richardemdu and Johannes Hunt and Johannes Den and Richard Fenn.

There’s also John Noakes, N-O-A-K-E-S, or John O. Noakes and Tom Stiles.

So lots of these names, most of them no longer use, but they were used in that same way just to give cover or provide pseudonyms for somebody who wanted them or needed them.

That’s really cool.

Well, thank you so much.

I appreciate you guys diving in and getting into the origin of where this came from.

Yeah, our pleasure.

Take care.

Be well.

All right.

You too.

Bye now.

Bye, Zach.

Yeah, I find it fascinating that there were so many other names that John Doe just seems to be the one that’s left standing along with Richard Rowe and a couple of others.

That’s really fascinating because I always wondered why in the world would John be named after a female animal?

It made no sense to me.

I think the clues and one of the names that I didn’t say when that was John Hunt.

And so a doe was an incredibly common animal for you to think about and pursue because, you know, food on the table.

So I’m not surprised at all that it might be used.

But you might think it was John Stagg.

John Stagg.

That’s true.

I just don’t know.

By the way, this is a question.

Do you know the Roman equivalent of John Doe and Richard Rowe?

John Doe and Richard Rowe.

These anonymous names that you use because there’s no point in naming specific people.

They’re just kind of catch all placeholder names.

Yeah.

One of them was Titius, right?

Right.

Titius, T-I-T-I-U-S, and Seius, S-E-I-U-S.

And so that’s, you will find that in ancient Roman documents where they’re talking about if two men named Titius and Seius did the following, then they would be, you know, prosecuted according to these following rules and laws.

How about that?

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