Laws Deserve More Than Those Cute Names

WASHINGTON — Laws used to have boring names, like the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Now they bear titles that seem focus-group-tested, like the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

That name, for President Obama’s health care law, never really took, partly because its initials did not create an acronym and partly because a lot of people preferred to call the law Obamacare.

For better legal marketing, consider the U.S.A. Patriot Act (for Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism), the Dream Act (for Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors) and the Disclose Act (for Democracy Is Strengthened by Casting Light on Spending in Elections).

At first blush, colorful names for bills and statutes can seem innocuous and even amusing. But scholars who have studied them make a persuasive case that they cheapen and distort the legal process.

“It is political maneuvering,” said Chris Sagers, a law professor at Cleveland State University. “This is a serious business, and it’s being treated like a game. I wish they would stop this nonsense.”

Brian Christopher Jones, a research fellow at Academia Sinica in Taiwan, said the phenomenon was distinctively American, a reflection of our national genius for promotion. But something more seems to be happening, too.

In a recent essay in The Yale Law & Policy Review, Mr. Jones argued that the names of laws have started to matter in Supreme Court decision making. That is all the more reason, he said, to insist on the reticent and neutral language of law rather than public relations puffery.

“All citizens, including legislators and judges, should be able to examine a law without being influenced by overtly partisan and misleading language,” he wrote.

Clever titles for laws are a new phenomenon, having appeared “perhaps three times in the entire history of the republic before 1988,” according to a comprehensive survey prepared by Professor Sagers.

When he first decided to look into the trend, he said, he expected to have some fun with the project. A little playfulness might reflect well on pompous lawmakers.

“But in drafting these statutes I think they are not laughing at themselves,” Professor Sagers wrote. “If they are laughing at anyone in particular, I expect it is us.”

In his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell saw where things were heading. “Political language,” he wrote, “is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

Professor Sagers’s paper listed some 70 laws known by acronyms meant to be clever, including Amber, Can-Spam, CARS, FACT (twice, for different laws), HOPE (ditto), LIFE, LIFT, Preemie, Vista and WARN (again, twice).

What the titles lack in wit they sometimes make up for in mendacity. Consider the law called America Competes (for America Creating Opportunities to Meaningfully Promote Excellence in Technology, Education and Science), which, Professor Sager wrote, “appears actually to have been just a fat pile of pork.”

Last spring, the Supreme Court considered the constitutionality of parts of two important laws: the Defense of Marriage Act and the Voting Rights Act. Both times, the laws’ names played a part in the justices’ analysis.

The marriage law denied federal benefits to gay couples married in states that allow such unions. Its defenders said it was an evenhanded attempt at uniformity: gay couples would be treated alike no matter where they lived.

But Roberta A. Kaplan, a lawyer challenging the law, said its very name belied that argument. “As the title of the statute makes clear,” she said, “DOMA was enacted to defend against the marriages of gay people.”

Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr. underscored the point. “This statute is not called the Federal Uniform Marriage Benefits Act,” he said.

When a decision in the case, United States v. Windsor, landed in June, the majority repeatedly cited the law’s name as evidence of its animus toward gay men and lesbians. In dissent, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said he was surprised that so much had been made of a “banal title.”

The day before, the court issued another 5-to-4 decision, Shelby County v. Holder, this one striking down part of the Voting Rights Act. That name might seem more straightforward, but it did not satisfy Justice Antonin Scalia when the case was argued in February.

“This is not the kind of a question you can leave to Congress,” he said, explaining that lawmakers “are going to lose votes if they do not re-enact the Voting Rights Act.”

“Even the name of it is wonderful,” he said. “The Voting Rights Act. Who is going to vote against that?”