tipstaff

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Related to tipstaffs: tipstaves

tipstaff

a court official having miscellaneous duties, mostly concerned with the maintenance of order in court, or, as in Ireland, looking after the judge's requirements in the course of the day.

TIPSTAFF. An officer appointed by the marshal of the court of king's bench, to attend upon the judges with a kind of a rod or staff tipped with silver.
2. In the United States, the courts sometimes appoint an officer who is known by this name, whose duty it is to wait on the court and serve its process.

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References in periodicals archive ?

travelling expenses of their Associates and Tipstaffs. Griffith

the salaries of Associates and to abolish Tipstaffs. He argued in

When the High Court went on strike

For this purpose the service of Clerks Associates and Tipstaffs are as necessary to them as to Judges of the State Courts ...

The Government did 'not consider that the interests of the community would be served by the abolition of Associates or Tipstaffs', (88) so each Judge would retain their usual one Associate and one Tipstaff.

Archives, the Australian High Court, and the 'strike of 1905'

This, I say, was done within six years, in broad day; in a city with its courts, lawyers, tipstaffs, judges, jails, and hangman; and not a hair on the head of one of those men has been hurt to this day.