Short Titles Act, 1973

This is a short, purely administrative Act with no substantive rights or obligations of its own. Its sole purpose, as stated in its preamble, was to assign convenient short titles to a list of Martial Law Regulations and Martial Law Orders that had automatically become Acts of the legislature under Article 280(3) of Pakistan's 1972 Interim Constitution, so that they could be cited and referred to more easily.

Section 2 directs that the laws listed in the Schedule (identified there by their original descriptive titles and Martial Law Regulation/Order numbers) are to be cited by the short titles given in the third column of that Schedule. The Schedule itself lists around thirty such laws, covering a wide range of subjects from the era of military rule, including regulations on requisitioning property in Rawalpindi, correcting false income tax returns, recovering illegally-acquired property, removing government servants from service, managing the Karachi Race Club, withdrawing high-denomination currency notes, settling evacuee property disputes, and taking over privately managed schools and colleges.

Because each entry in the Schedule is itself the short title of a separate underlying law (many of which may since have been repealed, amended, or superseded), this Act functions mainly as a historical index rather than a law that independently regulates any activity today. Anyone looking for the substance of one of these renamed regulations would need to look up that regulation under its assigned short title, not this Act itself.

This is an old law from the 1973 martial-law transition period, and its own Section 3 was later omitted by a 1981 ordinance; it is chiefly of historical and citation interest rather than ongoing regulatory relevance.