History
The title "Attorney General" was used in colonial North Carolina as early as 1677, when George Durant was appointed by Governor John Jenkins. In theory, colonial Attorneys General represented the British Attorney General, who represented the Crown.
The first North Carolina Constitution (1776) established the office of state Attorney General. Like the state Governor, the Attorney General was at that time elected by the legislature, the North Carolina General Assembly. The first Attorney General for the independent state of North Carolina was Waightstill Avery, who served from 1777 to 1779. Two of Avery's successors, James Iredell and Alfred Moore, both served on the United States Supreme Court. Since 1868, the Attorney General has been elected by the people. The state Department of Justice was created by the legislature in the early 1970s. At the same time, the Attorney General became a voting member of the Council of State, rather than the legal advisor to the council.
Before being elected the state's Governor, Mike Easley was Attorney General of North Carolina from 1993 to 2001. Occupants of the office often run for Governor of North Carolina or United States Senator, but few have been successful, with notable exceptions including Easley and Senator Robert B. Morgan.
Read more about this topic: North Carolina Attorney General
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“You treat world history as a mathematician does mathematics, in which nothing but laws and formulas exist, no reality, no good and evil, no time, no yesterday, no tomorrow, nothing but an eternal, shallow, mathematical present.”
—Hermann Hesse (1877–1962)
“Every library should try to be complete on something, if it were only the history of pinheads.”
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809–1894)
“I am ashamed to see what a shallow village tale our so-called History is. How many times must we say Rome, and Paris, and Constantinople! What does Rome know of rat and lizard? What are Olympiads and Consulates to these neighboring systems of being? Nay, what food or experience or succor have they for the Esquimaux seal-hunter, or the Kanaka in his canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore, the porter?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)