English
French
Spanish
VietnameseGriffin: The ‘duty to defend does not include defense of laws for which no tenable argument can be made’
LITTLE ROCK – Following his filing of an answer to a lawsuit in federal court, Attorney General Tim Griffin issued the following statement:
“Today, I filed an answer to a lawsuit in federal court involving the Alcoholic Beverage Control Division. In today’s filing, I acknowledge that the Arkansas law at issue in this suit is unconstitutional. One of my key responsibilities as Attorney General is to defend state law, but the duty to defend does not include defense of laws for which no tenable argument can be made. This is clearest in cases like this — when the law in question violates the United States Constitution as confirmed by recent, well-founded precedent. The Arkansas law in this case is even more egregious than the one the United States Supreme Court rejected in 2019 with a 7-2 majority.”
About Attorney General Tim Griffin
Tim Griffin was elected attorney general of Arkansas on November 8, 2022. He was elected lieutenant governor of Arkansas on November 4, 2014, and was re-elected for his second four-year term on November 6, 2018. From 2011-2015, Griffin served as the 24th representative of Arkansas’s Second Congressional District. For the 113th Congress, he was a member of the House Committee on Ways and Means while also serving as a Deputy Whip for the Majority. In the 112th Congress, he served as a member of the House Armed Services Committee, the House Committee on Foreign Affairs and the House Committee on the Judiciary.
Griffin is a graduate of Magnolia High School, Hendrix College in Conway, and Tulane Law School in New Orleans. He attended graduate school at Oxford University. Griffin has served as an officer in the U.S. Army Reserve’s Judge Advocate General’s (JAG) Corps for over 25 years and currently holds the rank of colonel. In 2005, Griffin was mobilized to active duty as an Army prosecutor at Fort Campbell, Kentucky and served with the 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault in Mosul, Iraq). He is currently serving as the Staff Judge Advocate (SJA) for the 81st Readiness Division at Fort Jackson, South Carolina. Prior to his current post, Griffin served as the Commander of the 134th Legal Operations Detachment (LOD) at Fort Bragg, North Carolina and a senior legislative advisor to the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness at the Pentagon. Griffin holds a master’s degree in strategic studies from the U.S. Army War College, Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania. He also served as U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas and Special Assistant to the President and Deputy Director of Political Affairs for President George W. Bush. Griffin lives in Little Rock with his wife, Elizabeth, a Camden native, and their three children.
###
