“Neither the governor nor his attorneys have the authority, as a matter of state law, to represent the state or its officials in any court or to determine the state’s litigation positions,” the lawyer, Solicitor General Carolyn Shapiro, wrote.

As a purely legal matter, she seemed to have a point. The Illinois Supreme Court has said the state attorney general “is the chief legal officer of the state and the state government’s only legal representative in the courts.”

The governor’s general counsel, Jason Barclay, did not really contest the point in his own letter in response. The governor had not meant to speak for the state, Mr. Barclay wrote. Indeed, he said, the brief “makes very clear that it is filed only in his individual capacity.”

If there is support for that assertion in the brief, it is hard to find. The phrase “individual capacity,” for instance, does not appear in it.

The assertion in any event presented its own problems, Ms. Shapiro wrote in a third letter. “It would be unlawful,” she wrote, for “state employees paid from public revenues to represent Mr. Rauner in his individual capacity in any matter.”