Long titles In the United Kingdom, the long title is important since, under the procedures of Parliament, a bill cannot be amended to go outside the scope of its long title. For that reason, modern long titles tend to be rather vague, ending with the formulation "and for connected purposes". The long title of an older act is sometimes termed its
rubric, because it was sometimes printed in red. Short titles for acts of Parliament were not introduced until the mid-19th century, and were not provided for every act passed until late in the century; as such, the long title was used to identify the act. Short titles were subsequently given to many unrepealed acts at later dates; for example, the
Bill of Rights, an act of 1689, was given that short title by the
Short Titles Act 1896, having until then been formally referred to only by its long title,
An Act Declaring the Rights and Liberties of the Subject and Settling the Succession of the Crown. Similarly, in the US, the
Judiciary Act of 1789, which was ruled unconstitutional in part by
Marbury v. Madison (1803), was called "An Act to establish the Judicial Courts of the United States". The long title was traditionally followed by the
preamble, an optional part of an act setting out a number of preliminary statements of facts similar to
recitals, each starting
Whereas... Short titles Unlike the long title, which precedes the
preamble and
enacting formula, and thus sits outside the main body of text, the short title for modern legislation is explicitly defined by a specific section, typically at the very end or very beginning of the main text. As with the above example, short titles are generally made up of just a few words that describe in broad terms the area of law being changed or the thing affected, followed by the word "Act" and then the year in which the legislation is formally enacted. Occasionally, the word "Act" may be replaced with another descriptor. Common examples are "Code" and "Charter". A notable exception is
Israel, in which this convention is reversed. The short title sits outside the main body of legislation, and the summary description of the law, which is made optional, is defined by a specific section if existing. For example, the Combating Iran's Nuclear Program Act, which under the usual convention would have begun with the long title and whose first section might have read actually begins with the short title and its first section reads The Australian state of
Victoria, since 1986, follows a similar practice, having a title comparable to a short title outside the main body of the legislation and a purpose section establishing the purpose of the legislation. Bills continue to have long titles (in similar terms to the purpose section) so that the scoping rules described in the
previous section continue to apply, but are removed and noted in the endnotes upon enactment. The titles of legislation enacted by the United States Congress, if they include a year, invariably add the preposition "of" between the word "Act" and the year. Compare the Australian
Disability Discrimination Act 1992 (Cth),
Disability Discrimination Act 1995 (UK), and
Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (US). Even if no year was included in the official short title enacted by Congress, it is traditional always to precede the year with an "of" if it needs to be appended in prose after the short title. This convention is followed by most but not all
U.S. states; for example, the Act of the
Pennsylvania legislature that consolidated the governments of the city of
Philadelphia and
Philadelphia County is generally (though not formally) called the
Act of Consolidation, 1854. The vast majority of acts passed by the
Parliament of Canada do not include the year of enactment as part of the short title. In acts passed by the
Congress of the Philippines, titling of legislation primarily follows the U.S. convention, although many acts contain the word "Law" instead of the more conventional "Act" either at the end of the title or before "of [year]" if they are comprehensive. Since the early 20th century, it has become popular in the United States to include the names of key legislators in the short titles of the most important acts. This was at first done informally; that is, the names appeared in legal treatises and court opinions but were not part of the statute as enacted. Eventually members of Congress began to formally write their own names into short titles (thereby immortalizing themselves for posterity), as in the
Hart–Scott–Rodino Antitrust Improvements Act and the
Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. In some states, like California, some short titles consist
only of the names of the key legislators, as in the
Lanterman–Petris–Short Act, the statutory basis of the "5150" involuntary psychiatric hold used for temporarily detaining psychiatric patients. Draft legislation (
bills) also uses short titles, but substitutes the word "Bill" for "Act". ==Style==