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Book Review

Robert Wechsler
It took a long time for Egil "Bud" Krogh to write his book on Watergate, but it finally came out a few months ago.

Krogh is not one of the better known Watergaters, partly because he pleaded guilty to his crimes. But as the head of the Plumbers, in charge of investigating leaks to the press, he oversaw the break-in of the office of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist. For years he has been giving lectures on ethics, a program he calls the...
Robert Wechsler
A quote from a lawyer in an article in today's New York Times brought me back to what I recently promised to discuss at the end of a blog entry about Elizabeth Wolgast's book, Ethics of an Artificial Person: Lost Responsibility in Professions and Organizations.

Daniel K. Webb, the head of Detroit Mayor Kwame...
Robert Wechsler

Elizabeth Wolgast’s 1992 book, Ethics of an Artificial Person: Lost Responsibility in Professions and Organizations, raises some very important government ethics questions. I will deal with just one of them here.

The term “artificial persons” includes lawyers and government officials who are considered to act in the name of others. Wolgast’s book looks at the problems such artificial persons cause with respect to our ordinary views of such ethical issues as responsibility and...

Robert Wechsler

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...

The President of City Ethics, Carla Miller, recently participated in the 2007 NGES Advisory Group in the review of the Ethics Resource Center's first National Government Ethics Study which was released Jan. 30, 2008. You can download a copy by registering at the ERC's website: http://www.ethics.org/

From the Executive Summary:

Public Trust is at Risk

  • Rates of misconduct in government are already high — nearly 60 percent of government employees see misconduct.
  • At present, 30 percent of misconduct across government goes unreported to management.

donmc

The Ethics Resource Center in Washington DC has released an interesting document for anyone active in the Ethics & Compliance Officer field - see the quotes below which give a taste of the subject of the document:

Note that they have removed the link to the paper. It may be elsewhere... [quote=The Ethics Resource Center (See: http://...

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