According to an article this week in Governing magazine, a report in Public Administration Review found that "more corrupt states tended to spend money on construction, highways, and police protection programs, which provide more opportunity for corrupt officials to use public money for their own gain. These states spend less on health, education, and welfare, which...

Many people believe that conflicts of interest are limited to situations where money is involved. When these people write ethics laws, as they often do, the law effectively says that where money isn't involved, any conduct is acceptable.

An investigative piece in yesterday's New York Times raises an interesting issue regarding complicity in ethical misconduct:  is there an obligation not to be complicit with misconduct at a different governmental level when, arguably, that misconduct financially benefits one's own government?

According to the article, when Bayonne, NJ was in deep financial trouble in 2010, with the state talking about bailing it out the way it had bailed out Camden in 2002, the Port...

Rhode Island's lawmakers really know how to protect themselves. They have fought hard and long to effectively preserve their immunity from state ethics commission jurisdiction. However, with pressure on them to recommend to their constituents a constitutional amendment that would give the EC jurisdiction over them, despite the state's Speech in (sic) Debate Clause, they have planted a bomb in their proposed amendment that will ensure that even the state's good government organizations...

Good news and bad news about lobbying from New York City's new mayor. The good news, according to a recent article on the Capital New York website, is that the mayor has said that his administration will disclose "substantive" meetings that members of his administration conduct with lobbyists. This is, he says, a practice he followed when he was the...

"Trials are primarily about the truth. Consent decrees are primarily about pragmatism."

— Second Circuit Court of Appeals in [Link removed] SEC v. Citigroup Global Markets, Inc., Nos. 11-5227-cv, 11-5375-cv and 11-5242-cv (2nd Cir., June 4, 2014).

These words from an important court decision yesterday will most likely be quoted in all sorts of contexts, including with respect to ethics settlements, the consent decrees of government ethics.

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