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Redundancy is a four-letter word. According to courts and scholars, redundant litigation is costly, unfair, and confounding. Modern civil procedure has a (nearly) maximalist preference for centralization, and various rules seek to limit duplicative suits within and across court systems. This seemingly dominant view stands in marked contrast to the reality of the modern regulatory state. Redundant public-private enforcement, in which public and private actors have overlapping authority to enforce the law, is ubiquitous. Redundant enforcement also is noticeably underrepresented in the substantial literature on private and public enforcement, which typically treats government agencies and private attorneys general as substitutes rather than complements. This Article seeks to fill these gaps. It begins with a survey of the myriad forms of redundant enforcement in U.S. law, and then turns to a defense of redundant public-private enforcement. Scholars of engineering and public administration have built up a powerful literature on the potential uses of redundancy, and this Article applies those insights to overlapping public and private enforcement in U.S. law. Drawing on those literatures, this Article derives principles of redundant enforcement that account for the diversity of agents and the potential for strategic behavior. It argues that redundancy may be an effective response to errors, resource constraints, information problems, and agency costs, if redundant-enforcement regimes harness multiple diverse agents and are tailored to the relevant regulatory environment. Specifically, if the lawmaker worries that public or private agents are missing good cases, redundant authority may help to reduce errors, increase resources, aggregate information, and improve monitoring-though permitting duplicative suits may undercut these gains. Meanwhile, if the lawmaker is concerned about under-enforcing settlements or judgments, symmetrically non-preclusive redundant litigation may be a valuable tool-though damages should ...

Scholars debating the relative merits of public and private enforcement have long trained their attention on the federal courts. For some, laws giving private litigants rights to vindicate important policies generate unaccountable private attorneys general" who interfere with public enforcement goals. For others, private lawsuits save cash-strapped government lawyers money, time, and resources by encouraging private parties to police misconduct on their own. Yet largely overlooked in the debate is enforcement inside agency adjudication, which often is depicted as just another form of public enforcement, only in a friendlier forum. This Article challenges the prevailing conception of administrative enforcement. Based on a comprehensive examination of over eighty administrative courts, I find that agencies rarely enforce on their own. Among other things, private parties may have procedural rights to file regulatory complaints, trigger agency investigations, demand evidentiary hearings, join public enforcement actions as parties, and even pursue claims without the involvement of the agency's enforcement arm. Although some administrative enforcement is virtually indistinguishable from either public or private enforcement in federal court, more often administrative schemes employ attributes of both. Combining public and private enforcement furthers the goals of agency adjudication while mitigating some of the dangers posed by transferring cases from generalist courts to specialized policymaking bodies with less formal procedures. Public enforcement offers greater political accountability and more coherent implementation of policy. Private enforcement supplements agency expertise with the situated knowledge of regulatory beneficiaries and enhances their access to legal remedies. And diversifying enforcement inputs reduces the risk of political or interest group capture of administrative schemes. These tools are especially valuable today, as presidential administrations increasingly use control over public enforcement ...