Ethics Reform

In a recent blog post, I wrote about a federal third circuit decision that a law prohibiting an ethics complainant from announcing the filing of the complaint violates the complainant's first amendment rights. This decision contradicts a second circuit decision that upheld a law prohibiting the announcing of the filing of a judicial...

Yesterday, four Pennsylvania state representatives, two from each of the major parties, announced a proposal to create a public integrity commission that would have greater powers than the current state ethics commission, and would jurisdiction over officials at all levels of government.

According to an article in the News-Tribune, the governor of Missouri recently signed an ethics bill (SB 844) that made many changes in the state's ethics and campaign finance programs, and failed to make others, such as a campaign contribution limit, which the legislature...

In researching a recent ethics complaint in Harlingen, Texas (pop. 67,000), I came across some disturbing ethics matters. The most disturbing can be seen from the minutes of the city development corporation's September 29, 2009 meeting (pp. 3-4).

If you're a city of a quarter million people with an ethics board that “has not met in many years and ... is effectively non-existent,” according to a council member who has proposed a new ethics ordinance, what do you do?

Not, I think, what the proposed ordinance (p. 16ff) does, which is create a new ethics board solely for council members, and consisting of two...

There are many ways to get ethics reform going (the Lone Ranger being out of fashion outside of New York State), but the choices are different in different states, and it's hard to know which one is best or most practicable for a particular community. An article in Tuesday's Florida Times-Union shows the choices facing Jacksonville's...