Who is solicitor general of the us

All Rights Reserved. Thank you for sharing! Your article was successfully shared with the contacts you provided. Brian Fletcher, former Stanford law professor, now Acting U. Solicitor General at the U. Department of Justice. August 13, at PM 2 minute read. Marcia Coyle. Elizabeth Prelogar. Courtesy photo.

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Exclusive Depth and Reach. Go to Legal Compass. Go to Events Go to Webcasts. Go to Lawjobs. Go to Professional Announcements. Legal Newswire. The Solicitor General is appointed by the President and must be confirmed by the Senate. Don Verrilli is the forty-sixth Solicitor General.

There are four Deputy Solicitors General, three of whom are usually career civil servants appointed on a non-partisan basis. There are also fifteen to seventeen Assistants to the Solicitor General who carry the workload of the office.

Because the job offers the rare opportunity to argue before the Supreme Court on a regular basis, competition for those positions is fierce; many Assistants are former Supreme Court clerks and law firm partners.

Several alumni of the office have found their way on to the current Supreme Court. So what does the Solicitor General do? First and foremost, the Solicitor General serves the dual roles of advocate for the government and an officer of the Supreme Court. In cases that the Court has agreed to review on the merits, the government also makes arguments in briefs and participates in oral arguments in the vast majority of cases eighty percent this Term.

This sometimes requires the Solicitor General to navigate among different federal agencies and cabinet departments; in many cases, there will be different views from a variety of departments, with the Solicitor General having to decide what the final government position is.

For example, the EEOC and the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice may want to read the civil rights laws expansively, while the Civil Division which defends the United States against civil rights suits may favor a narrower interpretation. As gatekeeper for the Court, the Solicitor General plays a sometimes delicate and difficult role. When the Solicitor General suggests that the Court deny review in a particular case, the Court relies heavily on this recommendation — assuming that it means that the case is insufficiently important or meritorious, rather than that it simply is contrary to the views of the government.

In this gatekeeper role, the Court will sometimes ask what the Solicitor General thinks about an issue of federal law in a case in which the government is not a party.

The Court generally issues such an order more than ten times a Term. Last June in Countrywide Home Loans v. The Solicitor General filed an amicus brief last October, in which it recommended that the Court deny review; the Justices denied review the following month.

The influence of the Solicitor General is so substantial that private parties with cases in the Supreme Court that involve some arguable federal government interest will often ask to meet with the Solicitor General to try to persuade him to file a brief on their side.

A major part of the duty of the Solicitor General is to defend laws passed by Congress. The Office generally takes the position that it will defend any act of Congress for which there is a plausible argument to be made that a statute is constitutional. Sometimes, though, the Solicitor General will change positions or decline to defend a statute, and on those occasions the Supreme Court may appoint a private lawyer to defend a particular position. Thus, the Solicitor General has advised Congress that it will not defend the constitutionality of central provisions of the Defense of Marriage Act.

Similarly, the Solicitor General will sometimes conclude that a ruling in its favor is incorrect. In a pair of cases argued on April 17, for example, the Justice Department changed its interpretation of the Fair Sentencing Act of , which was designed to eliminate some of the wide disparity in criminal sentences between crack and powder cocaine crimes: although it had previously argued that the Act should not apply to defendants who were convicted of crack cocaine offenses before the law went into effect but were not sentenced until after the law was already in effect, when the issue made its way to the Court it agreed with the defendants that they should receive the benefit of the new sentencing law.

Thus, in the cases of Dorsey v. United States and Hill v. United States , which were consolidated for one hour of oral argument, the Court appointed experienced Washington practitioner Miguel Estrada to argue for the position that the government had essentially scrapped.

There is one role the Solicitor General handles that is even lower visibility than his Supreme Court duties. When the federal government loses a case in a federal district court, it is the Solicitor General who must decide whether to appeal or instead to accept the loss.

While this role is virtually invisible outside the government, it can be contentious within government circles. Much of what the Solicitor General does is not the subject of great public attention. It is only at times like the health care cases and the recent argument over the Arizona immigration law that the role of the Solicitor General is catapulted into the public spotlight and becomes the focus of controversy and debate.

But the work of the Solicitor General plays a critical role for the executive branch and the Supreme Court, even when there are no cameras pointed in that direction. On Friday, the Supreme Court moved the Texas abortion litigation off the shadow docket and onto the "rocket docket. The court has adjusted its November argument schedule to reflect the accelerated consideration of the Texas abortion law. Ramirez v. Collier, originally scheduled for Nov.