Legal Commentary

I once heard a story, although I forget from whom, about why Bush v. Gore is captioned "Bush v. Gore." After all, the particular lawsuit that ended up in the Supreme Court was captioned "Gore v. Harris" in the Florida state courts, since it was an attempt to contest Katherine Harris's certification of the election... according to the story, the Supreme Court's reporter of decisions -- Frank Wagner -- decided that the case "had" to be called Bush v. Gore, because that's really what it was. (In contrast, the Supreme Court's earlier per curiam decision sending the case back to the Florida courts was captioned "Bush v. Palm Beach County Canvassing Board.")

Anyway, this got me thinking about why we don't choose "appropriate" or "more accessible" case names for more major Supreme Court cases. After all, in the "old" days, it was common to do so -- just consider the Legal Tender Cases, the Slaughterhouse Cases, the Civil Rights Cases, the Chinese Exclusion Case, the Japanese Immigrant Case, the Selective Draft Law Cases, and the Gold Clause Cases, just to name a few, none of which are remembered by the names of the actual litigants, even where that's how they're memorialized in the U.S. Reports... (curiously, the Slaughterhouse and Civil Rights Cases are actually so captioned).

Why, except for Bush v. Gore, don't we do that anymore? Is Frank Wagner right (if the story is true) that cases should be captioned in a manner that makes them more publicly accessible whether or not it's a technically correct statement of the parties? If so, any suggestions for recent decisions of note?