Category:Attorneys General of the United States

Edmund Randolph took the oath as the first Attorney General of the United States in September 1789, charged at the time with little more than representing the federal government before the Supreme Court and offering legal opinions to the President. The post he occupied was a part-time advisory role with no department behind it. The men and women collected on this page traveled a long arc from that modest origin to leadership of one of the largest legal organizations in the world, the United States Department of Justice. They served under presidents from George Washington to the twenty-first century, prosecuted antitrust cases and civil rights violations, defended federal statutes in court, and at times resigned in protest or were dismissed in scandal.

Background

The office was created by the Judiciary Act of 1789, the same statute that organized the federal court system. For its first eight decades the Attorney General had no department, no staff to speak of, and a salary lower than that of other cabinet officers. Holders of the office maintained private legal practices on the side. Caleb Cushing, Jeremiah Black, and other antebellum occupants issued formal opinions that shaped federal practice on questions ranging from slavery to public lands, but they did so largely as solo practitioners with a clerk or two.

The Department of Justice was established by act of Congress in 1870, during the administration of Ulysses S. Grant, partly in response to the demands of Reconstruction litigation and the need for a coordinated federal response to the Ku Klux Klan. Amos T. Akerman, the second Attorney General to serve under Grant, used the new department aggressively against Klan violence in the South. From that point forward the office combined two distinct functions: cabinet-level policy advisor to the President, and chief administrative officer of a sprawling federal legal bureaucracy that today includes the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the United States Marshals Service, and the network of United States Attorneys.

The Attorney General is nominated by the President and confirmed by the Senate. The office is fourth in the presidential line of succession, after the Vice President, the Speaker of the House, and the President pro tempore of the Senate. Tenure has varied widely. Some Attorneys General have served a full presidential term or longer; others have lasted only months.

Notable members

The individuals grouped here span the full historical range of the office, though the category does not contain every officeholder. They reflect several recognizable patterns in how the position has been filled and what it has demanded.

A first pattern is the elite courtroom advocate elevated to public service. Edward Bates, appointed by Abraham Lincoln in 1861, came from the Missouri bar and had been a contender for the Republican presidential nomination the year before. His tenure coincided with wartime questions about habeas corpus, military commissions, and the legal status of freed slaves. William M. Evarts, who served under Andrew Johnson, had already led Johnson's defense in the impeachment trial before taking the office, and he later served as Secretary of State and as a senator from New York.

A second pattern is the political operator placed at Justice as a trusted ally of the President. The most discussed twentieth-century example, Robert F. Kennedy, served as Attorney General under his brother John F. Kennedy from 1961 to 1964. His tenure intertwined civil rights enforcement in the South, prosecution of organized crime, and direct involvement in foreign policy crises including the Cuban Missile Crisis. The closeness of the relationship between president and attorney general in that period prompted later debates about the proper independence of the office. John Mitchell, who managed Richard Nixon's 1968 campaign before becoming Attorney General, illustrated the risks of that closeness. He was convicted of conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and perjury for his role in the Watergate cover-up and served time in federal prison, the only former Attorney General to do so.

A third pattern is the career lawyer or judge brought in to professionalize or restore the department after a period of strain. Edward H. Levi, appointed by Gerald Ford in 1975, came from the deanship of the University of Chicago Law School and is associated with the post-Watergate effort to insulate prosecutorial decisions from White House interference. Griffin Bell, a former federal appellate judge, served under Jimmy Carter in a similar reformist vein.

Earlier figures in the category illustrate the office before the modern department took shape. Roger B. Taney served as Attorney General under Andrew Jackson before his appointment as Chief Justice of the United States, where he later wrote the Dred Scott opinion. Caleb Cushing served under Franklin Pierce and produced a large body of formal opinions that long served as reference works for federal lawyers. Charles Lee, one of the early holders of the office under Washington and John Adams, argued in Marbury v. Madison.

The Gilded Age and Progressive Era brought attorneys general engaged in railroad regulation, antitrust enforcement, and the expansion of federal criminal jurisdiction. The New Deal and Cold War decades produced occupants who oversaw loyalty programs, internal security prosecutions, and the early federal involvement in civil rights litigation that culminated in the work of the 1960s.

The work of the office

The duties accumulated by these individuals fall into a few broad categories. The Attorney General supervises federal criminal prosecution through the United States Attorneys and the litigating divisions of the Department of Justice. The office oversees federal civil litigation in which the United States is a party. It issues formal legal opinions binding on the executive branch, a function inherited from the earliest days of the office and now exercised primarily through the Office of Legal Counsel. It supervises the federal prison system and the principal federal investigative agencies.

The Attorney General also plays a recurring role in constitutional confrontations between branches of government. Several officeholders represented here have been at the center of such episodes, whether in debates over executive privilege, the scope of presidential pardon power, the conduct of special prosecutors, or the limits of warrantless surveillance. The office sits at the point where law enforcement, political accountability, and constitutional interpretation meet, and the careers gathered on this page reflect that uneasy intersection across more than two centuries.