Talk:List of legislation named for a person

This article was nominated for deletion on 27 October 2011 (UTC). The result of the discussion was keep.

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Added ARS Tag[edit]

These are comments I made at the AfD: This discussion provides the opportunity for an interesting application of current list related guidelines. I intend to withhold my position until I see further discussion, but have these general comments. If we were to apply list notability guidelines to this article, then I would expect to see sources that demonstrate Legislation named for a person has been discussed as a group by a reliable source. I suspect those sources exist but a quick Google search doesn’t reveal them. Quite possibly this is because we haven’t really characterized this list very well. Quite possibly (I am not a expert in law), what we are really referring to are Namesake Laws or Namesake Legislation. Whether those are traditional legal terms, I do not know, but if they were, and there was an article entitled Namesake laws (there isn’t), then this list would be a perfect extension of the main article, regardless of how broad a topic that might be. The other alternative is to view this list as a set-index article where the only entries were namesake laws that had WP articles. Red-linked articles would make the cut. If that is the purpose of the list, then Index of Namesake Legislation is a better title. I am appending the WP:ARS tag to this discussion, to see if some of the above can be addressed in the article and this discussion. --Mike Cline (talk) 12:09, 28 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Legislation--Long title, Short title, Popular name dilemma[edit]

When legislation is drafted in the U.S., U.K., N.Z. and AU, that legislation is given two names--A Long title and a short title. For example here's the guidance from AU on how to do that. There's a complete Act in the UK Short Titles Act, and there's ample evidence this practice is used in U.S. legislation. [1]. Typically, the Short Title is identified in legislation as: "SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE; TABLE OF CONTENTS. 2 (a) SHORT TITLE.—This Act may be cited as the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. [2] Both Long and Short titles of legislation can be considered official titles which are formally incorporated into the law. Unfortunately, a dilemma is created when laws assume an informal or Popular name. A good example is the USA Patriot Act whose short title reads: SHORT TITLE- This Act may be cited as the `Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism (USA PATRIOT ACT) Act of 2001 yet has a popular title--USA Patriot Act. Sometimes the popular names is a subset of the short title such as the Patriot Act, but popular names can be completely different from the short title. For example: Short Title, Subtitle A of title XVII of Pub. L. 103–322, which is classified generally to this subchapter, is popularly known as the Jacob Wetterling Crimes Against Children and Sexually Violent Offender Registration Act.[3] This act has the popular name of Megan's Law.

Our dilemma for this list article is the need to find common ground on which to include individual entries. Of course the first criteria is that the title (name) (popular or short) of the legislation involves a person. Second, and this is the dilemma, almost all legislation has an official short title, but not all legislation has assumed the moniker of a popular title. Since popular titles are generally conferred by discussions by scholars and in the media, this may provide us a bit more discrete criteria for inclusion. Clearly for this list to grow and mature, we need to resolve this dilemma. Is this list about Popular titles--those conveyed by scholars and media, Offical short titles--those embodied in the legislation, or both. My preference would be Popular titles because inclusion criteria would be more discrete and easily sourced. --Mike Cline (talk) 13:42, 31 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

For the time being, I think that no distinction should be made between popular titles and short titles. I do not think that it is worth distinguishing between them. I think that this list should include the name that refers to a person, whether that name is authorised by statute or not.

Of the names applied to UK statutes, only one ("Poynings' Law" a.k.a. "Poynings' Act 1495") is authorised by statute, and even in that case, I suspect that all they have done is given official recognition to the popular title that was already being used. James500 (talk) 16:57, 31 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]