Civil society, for Locke, begins with a surrender. In the state of nature, anyone may punish a wrong done to the community. In society, that power passes to a common authority, and only the sovereign may avenge public wrongs. Blackstone put the same idea in the language of the common law: private wrongs are the injured party’s to redress, public wrongs are the Crown’s. The Framers absorbed the distinction and gave it a specific constitutional home: “The executive Power,” Article II begins, “shall be vested in a President.”
One pocket of private prosecution, however, survives that settlement. “Qui tam” is a Latin shorthand for “one who brings an action for the king as well as for himself.” Under the False Claims Act’s qui tam provisions, a private plaintiff or “relator”—with no injury of her own, no office, and no constitutional oath—may sue in the name of the United States, litigate the government’s claim, and keep up to 30 percent of what she recovers. Last fiscal year, relators filed a record 1,297 such suits. Nearly half of what they recovered came in cases the Justice Department had declined to join.
The Act was born of wartime desperation. In 1863, with contractors selling the Union Army spavined mules and sawdust for gunpowder, Congress reached for an old English legal device and offered a bounty to anyone who would sue a fraudster in the government’s name. The Justice Department did not yet exist; the prosecutor’s office was thin and far from the front. As Senator...
President Lee Jae Myung called Tuesday for a firm government response to the spread of false information about eggs imported from Brazil. During a closed-door session of a Cabinet meeting at Cheon...