Everyone wants to be attorney general! Or at least, a whole lot more people do now than they did last July, when the utter lack of candidates played into the D.C. Council’s ultimately overturned decision to move the race to 2018. A week after defense attorney Karl Racine and policy lawyer Lateefah Williams entered the race, the contest now has a fifth contender in insurance coverage lawyer Lorie Masters.

Masters, a 59-year-old Chevy Chase resident originally from Michigan, picked up nominating petitions today from the D.C. Board of Elections. Masters, a board member of good-government advocacy group D.C. Appleseed, plans to take a leave from her job at law firm Perkins Coie to run.

“I just feel like I’ve done a lot of behind the scenes work in favor of the District, and at this point in my career I’d like to bring that to a more public and public policy-oriented place,” Masters tells LL.

LL’s been asking each attorney general candidate how they would have handled attorney general Irv Nathan‘s legal battle to declare the 2013 budget autonomy legally meaningless, but Masters has court documents to back up her answer. During the D.C. Council’s ultimately unsuccessful court battle to enforce the referendum, Masters filed an amicus brief on behalf of District lawyers who supported the District unilaterally declaring itself free of congressional budget oversight.

On WAMU’s The Politics Hour last week, Paul Zukerberg, the attorney general candidate who filed a lawsuit to keep the race in 2014, asked where the new candidates were when he was fighting to ensure the race stayed in 2014. Asked about Zukerberg’s challenge, Masters says it’s time to move past that legal fight and think about the future of the job.

“I think Paul did a great service, but at this point it’s a question about who can best acquit themselves in the office,” Masters says.

Photo courtesy Lorie Masters