# Office of the Solicitor General The [[Department of Justice]] office that speaks for the United States in the [[Supreme Court of the United States]] — and, less visibly, controls which cases the government appeals anywhere. Nicknamed **"the tenth justice"** for its outsized influence over the Court's docket and doctrine. Counterpart to the [[Office of Legal Counsel]]: OLC says what the executive may do *before* it acts; OSG defends what it did *in court*. ## Where its authority comes from Created with the Justice Department itself in 1870 (28 U.S.C. § 505); the Solicitor General is the only officer required by statute to be "learned in the law." Functions codified at 28 U.S.C. § 518 and 28 C.F.R. § 0.20: conduct of Supreme Court litigation, and control of appeals. ## What it actually does - **Supreme Court litigation.** Briefs and argues the government's merits cases; files certiorari petitions; responds when the Court calls for the government's views (CVSG) even in private disputes. - **The appeal gate.** No federal agency may appeal a district-court loss, seek rehearing en banc, or petition for cert without OSG sign-off — a centralized choke point that lets one office set the government's litigation strategy across every circuit. - **Amicus strategy.** Decides when the U.S. weighs in on cases it isn't party to — historically the office's main lever on constitutional doctrine. - **Confession of error.** By tradition, OSG will tell the Court when the government won below on bad law — the core of its (now strained) reputation for candor independent of the administration's interests. Staff: the SG, four deputies (traditionally three career, one political), and ~17 assistants — with the SCOTUS-clerk density of an elite boutique. Alumni ladder: Taft, Robert Jackson, Thurgood Marshall, Bork, Kagan — the job is a standing audition for the bench. ## The Sauer era The current SG is **[[D. John Sauer]]** (confirmed April 4, 2025) — previously [[Donald Trump]]'s personal appellate lawyer, who argued and won [[Trump v. United States]] (presidential immunity) before taking the government job. The traditional independence claim is thus inverted: the president's own advocate now wields the tenth-justice apparatus. Signature moves: - **Shadow-docket maximalism** — aggressive use of emergency applications to stay lower-court injunctions against the second-term program (removals, funding freezes, deportations), converting interim relief into de facto merits wins. - **The big Article II cases** — argued the government's side in [[Trump v. Slaughter]] (removal, overruling [[Humphrey's Executor v. United States]]), the [[Executive Order 14160]] birthright-citizenship litigation (see [[Birthright Citizenship Attack]]), and the IEEPA tariff cases ([[Liberation Day Tariffs]]) — winning the first, with the tariffs struck down Feb. 20, 2026. - **Candor erosion** — repeated judicial and scholarly accusations of misrepresenting facts in emergency filings, a break from the office's institutional brand. ## Position in the ecosystem OSG is where OLC's internal law meets external judges. An [[Office of Legal Counsel]] opinion governs until someone with standing sues; then OSG's job is to make the opinion stick in court. When both offices are staffed from the same movement pipeline — [[Federalist Society]] credentials, Trump-defense résumés — the pre-clearance and the defense merge into a single strategy, which is the second term's actual innovation. ## See Also - [[Department of Justice]] - [[Office of Legal Counsel]] - [[Supreme Court of the United States]] - [[D. John Sauer]]