John Doe: The 700-Year Biography of the Law's Most Famous Phantom

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John Doe was never a person. He was a workaround. In the rigid common law courts of medieval England, under King Edward III, a landowner could not simply sue a squatter without the right writ. So lawyers invented a fake tenant named John Doe, a fake villain named Richard Roe, and a staged dispute called ejectment that forced the real occupant to step forward. Everyone in the courtroom knew the names were fiction, and the public grew so tired of the pair that an 1834 satirical song cast them as greedy giants draining English wallets.

The loophole was abolished in 1852, yet the phantom refused to die. This episode follows the name across the Atlantic and into far heavier work: tagging unidentified bodies, shielding plaintiffs in landmark cases, and protecting assault survivors who wanted justice without surrendering their privacy. Along the way it meets Ashok Kumar in India, X Ben X in Morocco, and a federal judge who rhymed his way from Carla Coe to William Woe, before asking what happens to legal anonymity in an age of facial recognition.

• Roman jurists faced the same problem centuries earlier and invented their own stand-ins for hypothetical plaintiffs and defendants.
• In 2005, lawyers for J.K. Rowling won a John Doe injunction against whoever was trying to sell stolen chapters of an unpublished Harry Potter book.
• A Toronto woman known only as Jane Doe fought the city's police for 11 years over a 1986 decision not to warn women about a serial rapist, and won in 1998.
• Chanel Miller was Emily Doe throughout the 2015 Stanford sexual assault case and chose to reveal her name in 2019.
• In 2021 an Ontario judge turned the name into a punishment, calling the fame-seeking Toronto van attacker John Doe to deny him the notoriety he wanted.