Learn about the role of Attorney General

Tierney seated infront of a bookshelf at Colvin Hall

James Tierney is a prominent University of Maine Law School alumni who served as the Maine Attorney General (AG) from 1980 to 1990. Since then, he Directed the National State General Attorney’s Program at Columbia Law and remained in said position for 16 years. Tierney is currently a lecturer on law at Harvard.

The AG is chief lawyer for the state, responsible for the case study of all homicide prosecutions and overseeing 110 lawyers state-wide.

“Your job as attorney general is to tell the truth because people inside the state government will disagree… It’s the attorney general’s job to call it straight,” said Tierney.

Tierney considers one of the greatest accomplishments of his career to be the terrific staff that he assembled as the AG, which had members from both in and out of state. He specified that it is problematic to hire based on friendship, politics or personal preferences.

Like many government positions, the role of attorney general comes with sleepless nights and notable struggles. Tierney described the need to assess one’s values as a lawyer to discern what is right from what is wrong in the pursuit of effective truth-telling. Since he has left office, Tierney has committed significant time to counseling others involved in similar practices.

For example, throughout the months following the George Floyd homicide, he served as a confidant to the AG of Minnesota, who had to address upwards of 25,000 heartbroken members of the community outside of his office.

“Be curious. The life of law is experience, it’s not what’s written down in the books. You need the books, you need the structure, but it’s the human experience… all these other facts go into the determination and those aren’t legal facts, they’re human facts. They’re the human experience. The lawyer’s job is to extrapolate the real human experience and put it into a sense of justice,” Tierney said.