# Justice Manual The **Justice Manual** is the Department of Justice's internal policy compendium — renamed from the *United States Attorneys' Manual* in 2018 — that governs how every federal prosecutor exercises charging discretion. Its most consequential title for criminal practice is **9-27.000, the Principles of Federal Prosecution**, which sets out when a prosecutor should commence a case, when to decline one, and what considerations are impermissible. The Manual's structural importance is out of all proportion to its legal force. It is the layer at which a federal case is filtered before any court ever sees it, and it carries the **approval requirements** that route sensitive categories — public corruption, election-related matters, media subpoenas, national-security cases — up through a component or through Main Justice before charges may be sought. By its own terms it creates **no enforceable rights**: a defendant cannot move to dismiss because the Manual was disregarded. It is a supervisory instrument, and it works only to the extent the supervisors enforce it. See [[How a Federal Prosecution Begins and Ends]] for where the Manual sits in the pipeline. > [!note] Stub > Phase 1 spine stub. Expand: the 1980 Principles of Federal Prosecution and their drafting history, the 2018 rename, the approval matrix for sensitive matters, the no-enforceable-rights disclaimer and the cases testing it, and the 2025–26 revisions. ## See also - [[How a Federal Prosecution Begins and Ends]] - [[Prosecutorial Discretion]] - [[Department of Justice]] · [[DOJ Component Tree]] - [[Public Integrity Section]]