There is one local government conflict of interest that is often ignored because it was created at the federal level by a federal statute. The statute is known as the Hatch Act of 1939 (Title 5, Subchapter III), originally known as An Act to Prevent Pernicious Political Activities (they don’t make statute names like they used to).

The Hatch Act limits the political activities...

New York politicians are making life hard for ethical politicians. “Present yourself as ethical,” they are effectively telling them, “and everyone will be harder on you when you don’t live up to expectations. Better to create no expectations at all.”

This isn’t what the government ethics community wants to hear.

The new example of an ethical politician caught with her pants down is New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, as we learned from...

Not all municipal ethics problems arise from a municipality. One place where there is a great deal of opportunity for municipal misconduct is the Department of Housing and Urban Development in Washington, D.C. (HUD)

HUD oversees and funds housing authorities across the country. It gets involved, directly and indirectly, in land and development deals and contracts.

As with so many other agencies, the people who run HUD come from the same world as the people they oversee and...

One nearly untouchable aspect of government ethics is the role of parties.

This is less a problem in municipalities than at other levels of government, because most municipalities in the U.S. are nonpartisan, although parties still play a role. But many municipalities and, in some states, particularly in the Northeast, all municipalities are still partisan. And most counties are partisan, as well.

In many cases, partisanship and local government are hard to separate. That is,...

In an upcoming book, The Rule of Law and Development, Michael Trebilcock and Ron Daniels divide developing countries into three groups (according to an article in last week’s Economist):

1. Those where politicians, lawyers, and the public all support legal reform (e.g., Central Europe after the end of communism);
2. Those where politicians support legal reform, but lawyers and the police do...