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…
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.”
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