Solicitor - United States

United States

Historically, solicitors existed in America, though the term referred to a lawyer who argued cases in a court of equity, as opposed to an attorney who appeared only in courts of law. With the chancery or equity courts disappearing or being subsumed under courts of law, solicitors became obsolete by the late 19th century. In more modern American usage, the term solicitor is understood to refer to government lawyers. For example, the title "solicitor" is still used by town, city, and county lawyers in Delaware, Georgia, Massachusetts, Maryland, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, and West Virginia. In the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, the professional organization for government lawyers is the City Solicitors and Town Counsel Association. On the federal level, departmental solicitors remain in the Department of Labor, Department of the Interior, and the Patent & Trademark Office, and the Solicitor General of the United States is the lawyer appointed to represent the federal government before the United States Supreme Court. In the U.S., "solicitor" is also used synonymously with salesman (with a pejorative connotation roughly equivalent to the British English word tout) as in the signed warning on public places of accommodation, "no soliciting".

In South Carolina, the position of "Circuit Solicitor" is analogous to that of State's Attorney or District Attorney in other jurisdictions.