Private attorney general is an informal term usually used today in the United States to refer to a private party who brings a lawsuit considered to be in the public interest, i.e., benefiting the general public and not just the plaintiff. The person considered "private attorney general" is entitled to recover attorney's fees if he or she prevails. The rationale behind this principle is to provide extra incentive to private citizens to pursue suits that may be of benefit to society at large.
Read more about Private Attorney General: Examples of Application, Civil Rights Attorney's Fees Award Act, Other Uses
Famous quotes containing the words private, attorney and/or general:
“No annual training or muster of soldiery, no celebration with its scarfs and banners, could import into the town a hundredth part of the annual splendor of our October. We have only to set the trees, or let them stand, and Nature will find the colored drapery,—flags of all her nations, some of whose private signals hardly the botanist can read,—while we walk under the triumphal arches of the elms.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Even an attorney of moderate talent can postpone doomsday year after year, for the system of appeals that pervades American jurisprudence amounts to a legalistic wheel of fortune, a game of chance, somewhat fixed in the favor of the criminal, that the participants play interminably.”
—Truman Capote (1924–1984)
“The general feeling was, and for a long time remained, that one had several children in order to keep just a few. As late as the seventeenth century . . . people could not allow themselves to become too attached to something that was regarded as a probable loss. This is the reason for certain remarks which shock our present-day sensibility, such as Montaigne’s observation, “I have lost two or three children in their infancy, not without regret, but without great sorrow.””
—Philippe Ariés (20th century)