INADMISSIBLE

Please don’t assume that Judge Harris L Hartz has no middle name. It’s right there, nine words ago. “My full middle name is the letter L,” said Hartz of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit. The L stands for nothing, and he uses no period.

Yet confusion persists, even at the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts in Washington. When the office released Hartz’s 2010 financial disclosure report to The National Law Journal, his electronic signature read: “s/ Harris L. [Redacted]-Hartz.” Asked by telephone why his name was redacted, Hartz laughed out loud. “That’s not the way I sent it in,” he said. David Sellers, a spokesman for the Administrative Office, gave this explanation: Someone inadvertently entered a number into the signature, and the stray keystrokes were redacted; also, computer software automatically added a period to the L. (To ensure accuracy, Hartz said he used to tell people his middle name was “L no period” but stopped after a family friend joked that it sounded “menopausal.”)