The Attorney General provided for by Section 173 of the Mississippi Constitution shall be elected at the same time and in the same manner as the Governor is elected. His term of office shall be four (4) years and his compensation shall be fixed by the Legislature. He shall be the chief legal officer and advisor for the state, both civil and criminal, and is charged with managing all litigation on behalf of the state, except as otherwise specifically provided by law. No arm or agency of the state government shall bring or defend a suit against another arm or agency without prior written approval of the Attorney General. He shall have the powers of the Attorney General at common law and, except as otherwise provided by law, is given the sole power to bring or defend a lawsuit on behalf of a state agency, the subject matter of which is of statewide interest. He shall intervene and argue the constitutionality of any statute when notified of a challenge thereto, pursuant to the Mississippi Rules of Civil Procedure. His qualifications for office shall be as provided for chancery and circuit judges in Section 154 of the Mississippi Constitution.
Miss. Code Ann. § 7-5-1
Qualifications, election, and duties
Applied in 32 court decisions — leading case Finch v. Mississippi State Medical Ass'n (1978)
Most recently applied in Noatex Corporation v. King Construction of Houston (April 2015)
Codes, 1930, § 3655; 1942, § 3826; Laws, 1930, ch. 154; Laws, 1970, ch. 348, § 1; Laws, 1991, ch. 573, § 3; Laws, 2012, ch. 546, § 1, eff from and after July 1, 2012.
How often courts cite this section
Court decisions citing this, by year. The dip in the last several years is a data-coverage gap, not a real trend — our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so recent citations are undercounted.
Current official text: Mississippi Code (LexisNexis). Digitized from the UniCourt Code Improvement Commission public-domain capture. Reproduced from public-domain Mississippi statutes; confirm against the official source for the current text. Not legal advice.