Missouri Attorney General
attorney general for the U.S. state of Missouri
The Office of the Missouri Attorney General was created in 1806 when Missouri was part of the Louisiana Territory. Missouri's first Constitution in 1820 provided for an appointed attorney general, but since the 1865 Constitution, the Attorney General has been elected. As of September 2025 there have been 45 attorneys general in Missouri.
By law, the attorney general is a member of the Board of Fund Commissioners, the Board of Public Buildings, the Governor's Committee on Interstate Cooperation, the Missouri Highway Reciprocity Commission and the Missouri Housing Development Commission.
Offices of the Attorney General are located throughout the state of Missouri with the main office being in the Supreme Court building in Jefferson City.
Attorney for the State
The Missouri Attorney General is the attorney for the state, representing the legal interests of Missouri and its state agencies.
As the state's chief legal officer, the attorney general must prosecute or defend all appeals to which the state is a party, including every felony criminal case appealed to the Supreme Court of Missouri and Missouri Court of Appeals. The attorney general also is required to institute, in the name and on behalf of the state, all civil suits and other proceedings that are necessary to protect the state's rights, interests, or claims. The attorney general may appear, interplead, answer or defend any proceedings that involve the state's interests, or appear on behalf of the state in declaratory judgment proceedings when the constitutionality of a statute is challenged.
The attorney general also renders official opinions to the executive and legislative branch and the county prosecuting attorneys on questions of law relating to their duties.
The public source identifies “Missouri Attorney General” as attorney general for the U.S. state of Missouri. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Missouri, Attorney and General.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 8, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6879488. VIAF identifies the subject as 130489887. The Library of Congress control number is no96039100. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1806, 1820, 1865 and 2025.
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This entry incorporates text from “Missouri Attorney General” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.