legal-terms
What is the meaning of the phrase &quot;be and the same?&quot;
<p>I applied for and received a court order to change my name and it had an odd phrase that I'm struggling to understand:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>...it is hereby ordered that the name of [previous legal name] <strong>be and the same</strong> is changed to [new legal name];</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I've searched around for definitions of this phrase but only found a few other examples of usage, some of which have an extra comma to produce &quot;<strong>be, and the same</strong> is hereby [granted/ordered/approved/etc],&quot; suggesting one might parse the sentence as two overlapping clauses &quot;the name of [X] be [Y]&quot; and &quot;the name of [X] is changed to [Y].&quot; But in that case I'm still not sure why those two clauses have distinct enough effects to need to both be present.</p>

<p>It's not a single phrase.  It's two different parts of a compound predicate in the passive voice.  The past participle is the same in both elements, so it is elided from one of them.  A more transparent but repetitive way of writing this is</p>
<blockquote>
<p>...it is hereby ordered that the name of [previous legal name] be changed to [new legal name], and the same is hereby so changed.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Or even</p>
<blockquote>
<p>...it is hereby ordered that the name of [previous legal name] be changed to [new legal name], and [previous legal name] is hereby changed to [new legal name].</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The purpose of this seemingly duplicate language is that saying &quot;it is ordered that X be Y&quot; in the subjunctive mood could be interpreted as saying that something should happen but not actually causing it to happen.  But saying &quot;it is ordered that X is Y&quot; was grammatically incorrect in the 17th century or so.</p>
