Recusal/Withdrawal

As I near the end of writing my local government ethics book, I am going over local government ethics codes looking for unusual, but valuable provisions to include in a special section that follows my discussion of the run-of-the-mill provisions.

I would like to share one of these provisions that is truly worth thinking about. It appears in the Windsor, CO ethics code:

§5.2.M. No

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Yet another brief has been filed in the Carrigan v. Commission on Ethics of the State of Nevada case, this time the EC's supplemental brief on remand to the Nevada Supreme Court.

The principal issue discussed in this brief is vagueness, which has stood in the background behind First Amendment issues of free...

A lot of interesting issues have arisen with respect to Santa Fe's Ethics and Campaign Review Board.

A Majority of Lawyers on an Ethics Board
First, a new selection process was created, and the ethics board members were replaced some time between the July and August meetings. Instead of having council members individually select ethics board members, which was a terrible idea, now a local bar...

Let's say you're a professional who wants to give something back to your community by serving on a city board or commission. You open up the newspaper and read that your mayor is saying, "It is not the five of us commissioners who make the city great. It's the citizens who are passionate about it, and now we're telling them, 'Sorry you can't serve.'"

Or the mayor is saying, "On certain boards we require professional experience. With what is now required by the Ethics Commission,...

A post yesterday in Coates' Canons: NC Local Government Law Blog raises an interesting issue about the situation of a local government candidate who has an interest in a contract with the local government which, by NC law, is prohibited not for candidates, but for a winning candidate the day he or she takes office. This provides a good occasion to look at the intersection of candidates and local government ethics...

The paths of justice have some odd twists to them. Consider these twists. As I wrote in a blog post almost exactly a year ago, both parties to a case involving a Baltimore council member's alleged acceptance of a bribe argued that a statutory provision entitled "Action for defamation against local government official" was not relevant to the case. Here is the text of that provision (§5-...