This collection includes opinions and memoranda written by Attorneys General, Assistant Attorneys General and Deputy Attorneys General. These typically answer questions of law posed by state agencies, the Governor, and legislators, but also sometimes answer questions posed by people outside of state government. The current statute relating to opinions on questions of law is 5 MRS §195.

The earliest Attorney General Opinion and Memoranda that we have in our collection are from 1874, but there is no clear start date to when they began. The current statute, 5 MRS §195, can be traced back to P.L. 1905, ch. 162. The earliest opinions and memoranda were included in the annual Report of the Attorney General. The Report of the Attorney General goes back to 1859, but opinions weren't always included in this publication. On January 19, 2022, The Office of the Attorney General transferred to the Law & Legislative Library scans of their physical collection of opinions. Many of these opinions were not previously published. We are continually adding to the collection as we discover opinions in the course of our research or when new opinions are issued.

These are organized chronologically. While later opinions were often assigned an identifying number, this was not always a formal system and it is unclear who was assigning the numbers and not all opinions and memoranda were assigned a number. When present, the numbers were sometimes hand-written on the opinions themselves. The numbering system may not have always been formal, but it is a valuable piece of citation information is included on these pages when available.

Depending on what information you are starting with, there are several ways to find opinions. If you are looking for a specific opinion or memoranda and know the date that the opinion was issued, then you can navigate to the corresponding year from the Attorney General Opinions and Memoranda homepage. If you are looking for opinions or memoranda that discuss a particular piece of legislation, statute, case, constitution, or regulation, use the Attorney General Opinion and Memoranda Master List. This is a page containing a single list of all the Attorney General Opinions and Memoranda in our collection along with all of the references used in those opinions or memoranda. Using the CTRL+F function in your browser, you can search using a controlled form of citations, which is loosely based on the University of Maine School of Law's Uniform Maine Citations. Note that citations within the Attorney General Opinions and Memoranda were checked for accuracy and corrected when appropriate. Therefore, citations on the webpage may look difference from those within the document.

• For enacted legislation, use PL yyyy, c. ###. Similarly, for Private and Special Laws, Resolves and Constitutional Amendments, use P&SL/Resolves/Const. Res. yyyy, c. ###.
• For proposed but not enacted legislation, use LD #### (xxxth Legislature yyyy). Note that if you are looking for a bill that eventually became law, search for the law citation rather than the original bill.
• For statutes, use the format of # MRSA ### for state statutes or # USCA ### for the US Code.
• For cases, use A.2d citations when available, and the Maine Reporter (Me.) for earlier cases. For US Supreme Court cases, use the S.Ct. citation. Note for cases is that we only included cases from courts in which Maine is part of their jurisdiction. As such, cases from other states are not included even if mentioned in the AG opinion or memoranda.
• For Maine Constitution sections, use Me. Const. Art. [roman numeral], Pt. #, §#. For US Constitution sections, use US Const. Art. [roman numeral], §# or US Const. Amend. [roman numeral].
• For regulations, the CMR citation is used, ##-### CMR ##. For the CFR, use, ## CFR ###.

Alert was originally a publication by the Criminal Division of the Office of the Attorney General and later by the Maine Criminal Justice Academy of the Department of the Attorney General. It was published from 1970-1982 and its purpose was summarized in the first issue: "...this Office intends to provide a continuing communication with the law enforcement community as to recent court decisions that affect law enforcement personnel and also to highlight in each issue certain areas of the criminal law in depth which most hamper the law enforcement officer in the carrying out of his duties." All of the issues of Alert are available online here: https://legislature.maine.gov/lawlib/lldl/rpts/Alert.html. Alerts are not included in the Attorney General Opinions and Memoranda collection.

Contact the Law and Legislative Reference Library via their "Ask a Law Librarian" web form