Source: Law & Liberty
by Cory L Andrews
“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. … 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.” (10/13/26)