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The solicitor general    is the lawyer who represents the federal government before the Supreme Court: He or she decides which cases (in which the United States is a party) should be appealed from the lower courts and personally approves each one presented ( [link] ). Most of the cases the solicitor general brings to the Court will be given a place on the docket. About two-thirds of all Supreme Court cases involve the federal government.

“About the Office.” Office of the Solicitor General. The United States Department of Justice . http://www.justice.gov/osg/about-office-1 (March 1, 2016).

The solicitor general determines the position the government will take on a case. The attorneys of his or her office prepare and file the petitions and briefs, and the solicitor general (or an assistant) presents the oral arguments before the Court.

Image A is of Justice Thurgood Marshall. Image B is of Donald B. Verrilli.
Thurgood Marshall (a), who later served on the Supreme Court, was appointed solicitor general by Lyndon Johnson and was the first African American to hold the post. Donald B. Verrilli Jr. (b) was the forty-sixth solicitor general of the United States, starting his term of office in June 2011 when Elena Kagan left the post to join the Supreme Court.

In other cases in which the United States is not the petitioner or the respondent, the solicitor general may choose to intervene or comment as a third party. Before a case is granted cert. , the justices will sometimes ask the solicitor general to comment on or file a brief in the case, indicating their potential interest in getting it on the docket. The solicitor general may also recommend that the justices decline to hear a case. Though research has shown that the solicitor general’s special influence on the Court is not unlimited, it remains quite significant. In particular, the Court does not always agree with the solicitor general, and “while justices are not lemmings who will unwittingly fall off legal cliffs for tortured solicitor general recommendations, they nevertheless often go along with them even when we least expect them to.”

Ryan C. Black and Ryan J. Owens. “Solicitor General Influence and the United States Supreme Court.” Vanderbilt University. http://www.vanderbilt.edu/csdi/archived/working%20papers/Ryan%20Owens.pdf (March 1, 2016).

Some have credited Donald B. Verrilli, the solicitor general under President Obama, with holding special sway over the five-justice majority ruling on same-sex marriage in June 2015. Indeed, his position that denying homosexuals the right to marry would mean “thousands and thousands of people are going to live out their lives and go to their deaths without their states ever recognizing the equal dignity of their relationships” became a foundational point of the Court’s opinion, written by Justice Kennedy.

Mark Joseph Stern., “If SCOTUS Decides in Favor of Marriage Equality, Thank Solicitor General Don Verrilli,” Slate.com . April 29, 2015. http://www.slate.com/blogs/outward/2015/04/29/don_verrilli_solicitor_general_was_the_real_hero_of_scotus_gay_marriage.html.
With such power over the Court, the solicitor general is sometimes referred to as “the tenth justice.”

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Source:  OpenStax, American government. OpenStax CNX. Dec 05, 2016 Download for free at http://cnx.org/content/col11995/1.15
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