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Should ethics commission members follow ethics laws to the letter, and no further, or should they provide leadership and a role model by going beyond legalism and instead acting ethically? State EC members in New York and Georgia are telling the world by their actions and their words that only the letter of the law matters in government ethics.

When the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives says, "the American people don’t care about process" in a news conference (the context was the process surrounding the health care bill), this topic, which is central not only to government ethics, but to our legal and political system, is worth focusing on.

Anyone who has been to law school knows that if process isn't everything, it is at least the...

Update: December 10, 2010 (see below)

After all I've written about the immunity courts have given legislators from enforcement actions by ethics commissions, I now can write about a court decision that gives ethics commissions and their staff immunity from suits by respondents in ethics enforcement actions, in this case one for defamation against an ethics board's executive director. The respondent in this case, however, is not a legislator, but a losing candidate for...

Update: February 5, 2010 (see below)

Here's an interesting dual position question, that is, a question involving one individual holding two government positions. The most important conflict involved in dual positions is that you cannot consistently fulfill your fiduciary obligations to one constituency while fulfilling your obligations to the other. See my blog post on state-local dual positions for a discussion of more...

Cities across the United States are creating and expanding Ethics Commissions, Ethics Offices and Inspector Generals in order to fight corruption and establish higher ethical standards for their governments.

I will be posting some of the best ideas from these programs on this site.

If you have comments on what is written, good, bad or just a stray idea, please comment!


Carla Miller, president, City Ethics.

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Update: February 3, 2010 (see below)

A NC Local Government Blog post yesterday made me aware that there have recently been some very public conflict of interest issues involving North Carolina's alcoholic beverage control (ABC) system, the state liquor sales program, which allows each city and county to have a local alcoholic beverage control board and employees (163 boards in all).