In most common law jurisdictions, the attorney general or attorney-general is the main legal advisor to the government, and in some jurisdictions he or she may also have executive responsibility for law enforcement or responsibility for public prosecutions.
The term is used to refer to any person who holds a general power of attorney to represent a principal in all matters. In the common law tradition, anyone who represents the state, especially in criminal prosecutions, is such an attorney. Although a government may designate some official as the permanent attorney general, anyone who comes to represent the state in the same way is referred to as such, even if only for a particular case.
Famous quotes containing the words attorney and/or general:
“Even an attorney of moderate talent can postpone doomsday year after year, for the system of appeals that pervades American jurisprudence amounts to a legalistic wheel of fortune, a game of chance, somewhat fixed in the favor of the criminal, that the participants play interminably.”
—Truman Capote (1924–1984)
“Anti-Nebraska, Know-Nothings, and general disgust with the powers that be, have carried this county [Hamilton County, Ohio] by between seven and eight thousand majority! How people do hate Catholics, and what a happiness it was to show it in what seemed a lawful and patriotic manner.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)