History
The office of Advocate to the monarch is an ancient one. The first recognised Lord Advocate was Sir John Ross of Montgrenan, recorded in 1483 as serving King James III.
From 1707 to 1998, the Lord Advocate was the chief legal adviser of the UK government and the Crown for Scottish legal matters, both civil and criminal, until the Scotland Act 1998 devolved most domestic affairs to the Scottish Parliament. The United Kingdom government is now advised on Scots law by the Advocate General for Scotland.
The Lord Advocate is not head of the Faculty of Advocates; that position is held by the Dean of the Faculty of Advocates.
Read more about this topic: Lord Advocate
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“A great proportion of the inhabitants of the Cape are always thus abroad about their teaming on some ocean highway or other, and the history of one of their ordinary trips would cast the Argonautic expedition into the shade.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Man watches his history on the screen with apathy and an occasional passing flicker of horror or indignation.”
—Conor Cruise O’Brien (b. 1917)
“In history the great moment is, when the savage is just ceasing to be a savage, with all his hairy Pelasgic strength directed on his opening sense of beauty;—and you have Pericles and Phidias,—and not yet passed over into the Corinthian civility. Everything good in nature and in the world is in that moment of transition, when the swarthy juices still flow plentifully from nature, but their astrigency or acridity is got out by ethics and humanity.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)