The term of office of the Advocate General of a State is :

Concept

The Constitution of India settles the tenure of a public office by the wording of the provision that creates it, and two distinct devices appear in that wording. One is a stated limit: the article or statute fixes a definite span of years, sometimes paired with a superannuation age, and the office falls vacant when that limit is reached. The other is the at-pleasure formula, “shall hold office during the pleasure of”, under which the holding of office may be ended whenever that pleasure is withdrawn — a constitutional pleasure exercised through the ordinary constitutional decision-making arrangement, and not the personal whim of the authority named. The two devices are not alternatives that exclude each other: Article 156 gives a Governor a five-year term and in the same article makes that office one held during the pleasure of the President. A provision may therefore use one device, the other, or both.

A tenure question is therefore settled by reading the creating provision and asking which of these devices it actually employs. Where the provision uses the at-pleasure formula and states no span of years and no age limit alongside it, there is simply no figure available to quote: the Constitution has withheld a fixed tenure from that office, rather than left the figure to be found somewhere else. Where a provision does state a limit as well, that limit is quotable and the pleasure operates on top of it.

Application

1. Identify the creating provision. The office of Advocate-General for a State is created by Article 165. Under Article 165(1) the Governor of each State appoints a person qualified to be appointed a Judge of a High Court to be Advocate-General for the State.

2. Read the duties clause. Article 165(2) makes the Advocate-General the State Government’s law officer: to give advice on such legal matters and perform such duties of a legal character as the Governor refers or assigns, and to discharge the functions conferred by the Constitution or any other law.

3. Read the tenure clause, which is the operative one. Article 165(3) provides that the Advocate-General "shall hold office during the pleasure of the Governor, and shall receive such remuneration as the Governor may determine."

4. Classify that clause. It states the at-pleasure form: it prescribes neither a span in years nor a retirement age, and it lays down no removal procedure for the office, since the holding of office may be ended by withdrawal of the pleasure itself.

5. Conclude. The term of office of the Advocate-General of a State is not fixed. The holder continues so long as the Governor’s pleasure lasts; by settled convention the Advocate-General tenders resignation when the Council of Ministers on whose advice the appointment was made resigns or is replaced, since the appointment is in substance made on ministerial advice.

Cross-check

The result can be confirmed by contrasting Article 165(3) with the provisions that do state a term, and by comparing the parallel Union office. Article 76(4) uses exactly the same words for the Attorney-General for India, who likewise holds office during the pleasure of the President; the Union and State law officers are treated alike in this respect.

A further check is that the qualification requirement in Article 165(1) borrows only the eligibility of a High Court Judge, not a Judge’s tenure: nothing in Article 165 imports the age-based term of Article 217(1), so no figure in years can be read into the office from that source either.