In most common law jurisdictions, the attorney general or attorney-general is the main legal advisor to the government.
In some jurisdictions, attorneys general also have executive responsibility for law enforcement, prosecutions or even responsibility for legal affairs generally. In practice, the extent to which the attorney general personally provides legal advice to the government varies between jurisdictions, and even between individual office-holders within the same jurisdiction, often depending on the level and nature of the office-holder’s prior legal experience.
Where the attorney general has ministerial responsibility for legal affairs in general , the ministerial portfolio is largely equivalent to that of a Minister of Justice in some other countries.
Although a government may designate some official as the permanent attorney general, anyone who came to represent the state in the same way could, in the past, be referred to as such, even if only for a particular case.
Civil law jurisdictions have similar offices, which may be variously called “public prosecutor general”, “procurators”, “advocates general”, “public attorneys”, and other titles. Many of these offices also use “attorney general” or “attorney-general” as the English translation of the title, although because of different historical provenance, the nature of such offices is usually different from that of attorneys-general in common law jurisdictions.
