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.

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Famous quotes related to united states:

    You may consider me presumptuous, gentlemen, but I claim to be a citizen of the United States, with all the qualifications of a voter. I can read the Constitution, I am possessed of two hundred and fifty dollars, and the last time I looked in the old family Bible I found I was over twenty-one years of age.
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    Fortunately, the time has long passed when people liked to regard the United States as some kind of melting pot, taking men and women from every part of the world and converting them into standardized, homogenized Americans. We are, I think, much more mature and wise today. Just as we welcome a world of diversity, so we glory in an America of diversity—an America all the richer for the many different and distinctive strands of which it is woven.
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