United States Attorney

Q: What's the difference between "district attorney" and "attorney general"? Are they organizations or ranks? Not English usage, but which of these gets to deduct a divorced couple's paycheck for child support before they get it?

A: an attorney general is "the chief legal advisor to a government". This is actually not quite the case in the United States, I would say, or at least it would be a bit confusing to say so. I'd say that an attorney general is "the chief legal *officer* of a government" (by which I mean, in the American case, the executive branch of a tripartite American-style separation-of-powers government). His job is not principally one of advising, but, I'd say, administering, enforcing, and policymaking. He's the member of the executive branch in charge of what I'd call "centralized law-enforcement policy stuff". In the federal government, the Attorney General is appointed by the President and is the head of the Department of Justice . He's a member of the Cabinet. You can get some sense of what the federal Attorney General does by studying the current one, To the best of my knowledge each of the U.S. state governments also has an officer called "the Attorney General". It is often the case, however, and perhaps usually the case, that said officer is elected by the people rather than appointed by the state's governor. In at least those cases in which the state attorney general is elected, I think the state attorney general is quite independent of the governor. Take New York state, in which you once lived. There the governor and attorney general are members of different parties and are in fact political rivals and the attorney general has, in the course of exercising the responsibilities of his office, taken action against officials responsible to the governor. What exactly do these state attorneys general do? their policymaking and administrative duties differ from state to state, but one thing I think they all do is represent the state government when it is sued civilly. Anyway, district attorneys are a whole nother thing. The district attorney is, in the state governments, the prosecutor of crimes for a particular local judicial administrative unit, typically a county. In some states, the term is different; it might be "state's attorney". While I'm sure that in some states the district attorneys (or the equivalent officials) are supervised by some state-level official, perhaps the Attorney General, I don't think that's typically how it works. Instead, and this is a real peculiarity of the American system, a district attorney is elected by the people of said administrative unit (such as a county).

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