united-states legal-terms civil-rights
What does it mean to &quot;prefer&quot; a lawsuit, and how is it different from filing?
<p>In <a href="https://www.huffpost.com/entry/after-19year-probe-feds-k_b_8443130" rel="nofollow noreferrer">an article</a> quoted by <a href="https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/55727/did-the-aclu-prepare-a-lawsuit-against-the-young-womens-leadership-school-of-ea">a recent Skeptics.SE answer</a>, there is the following sentence:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We had <strong>preferred</strong> but couldn't file a lawsuit because no boy presented himself as a plaintiff for admission to the Young Women's Leadership School.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Commenters were wondering about the meaning of &quot;preferred&quot;.  It could be a typo for &quot;prepared&quot;, or a grammatical error in saying that they preferred <em>to</em> file a lawsuit.  But &quot;prefer&quot; also seems to have a technical legal meaning, e.g. <a href="https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/prefer" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Wiktionary</a> has &quot;To present or submit (something) to an authority (now usually in 'to prefer charges')&quot;.  However, that would seem at first glance to correspond to <em>filing</em> the lawsuit, which is just what the author said they could not do.  So maybe there are separate steps involved?</p>
<p>Can someone explain what is probably meant by this passage?  What specific steps toward a lawsuit is the author saying that the plaintiffs took, and which steps were they unable to take?</p>
<p>The article's author is a lawyer, so I would assume by default that they are familiar with the terms, and that the usage is deliberate instead of a mistake.  The lawsuit in question would have been in US federal court.</p>

<p>The word is not being used in the technical sense here, and is not a mistake.</p>
<p>The legal term you are thinking that they might have been intending to use is &quot;<a href="https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/proffer" rel="nofollow noreferrer">proffered</a>&quot;. But that wasn't the word that they were trying to use.</p>
<p>The author is saying that their first choice of legal tactics would have been to file a civil lawsuit with a test plaintiff, who is a boy seeking to be admitted to the Young Women's Leadership School. But, because they could not manage to make this ideal legal tactic work, because they could find a boy willing to do so, they chose to take their Plan B legal tactic instead.</p>
