City Ethics | Breaking the oxymoron: "City Ethics"

Campaign Finance & Pay-to-Play November 5, 2011

Lessig on the Effects of Elected Officials' Dependency Problem

Lawrence Lessig's excellent new book Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress—and a Plan to Stop It (Twelve, Oct. 5, 2011) is about Congress and mostly about campaign finance, but it is also an important look at institutional corruption that has some valuable things to say that are relevant to l…

Ethics Commissions & Administration November 1, 2011

Lobbying An Ethics Commission Should Be Lobbying

Can a local ethics commission be lobbied? It's conceivable, especially with respect to recommendations for ethics reform. It is important for an ethics commission to have an ethics code provision or regulation that prohibits ex parte communications relating to any proceeding. But with respect to et…

Resources & Learning October 14, 2011

The Lucifer Effect IV — Miscellaneous Observations

This fourth blog post on Philip Zimbardo's book The Lucifer Effect is a miscellany of various ideas in the book that have relevance to local government ethics. An Ethics Commission With Lips Zimbardo raises an interesting thought experiment. What if there were a reverse Milgram authority experiment…

Resources & Learning October 13, 2011

The Lucifer Effect III — Debriefing and Other Ways to Deal with Situational Forces

This third blog post on Philip Zimbardo's book The Lucifer Effect looks at some ways to deal with situational forces. Recognizing Our Limitations One of the college students who played a guard in the Stanford Prison Experiment said later, "I was actually beginning to feel like a guard and had reall…

Resources & Learning October 12, 2011

The Lucifer Effect II — Situational Forces

This second blog post on Philip Zimbardo's book The Lucifer Effect applies the situational approach to government ethics programs, and looks at the situational forces at play with respect to ethical misconduct. The Situational Approach It is in the interests of those who are responsible for the pre…

Resources & Learning October 12, 2011

The Lucifer Effect I — A Situational Approach to Local Government Ethics

A year and a half ago, I wrote a blog post about a 2007 book by Philip Zimbardo, entitled The Lucifer Effect. I had read about Zimbardo's book in another book, Susan Neiman's Moral Clarity. I finally got around to reading The Lucifer Effect, and I highly recommend it, despite its length and the sma…

Conflicts of Interest October 4, 2011

Helping Contractors Rather Than the Public

One thing jumped out at me from an article on the front page of the New York Times today that deals with a common government ethics situation. The situation involves a lobbyist hired because he had a close personal and professional relationship with the head of a department that had to approve his …

Ethics Commissions & Administration October 3, 2011

Carrigan and an Obligation to Seek Ethics Advice

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 issue…

Transparency & Disclosure September 28, 2011

Preserving Records and Setting Up Responsible Gift Procedures

What can be done when a public agency that gives gifts to public officials destroys its gift records? This question arises from an article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution last week about the Alpharetta (GA) Convention and Visitors Bureau, an independent agency funded partially by a local hotel …

September 21, 2011

A Miscellany

Legal Disciplinary Proceeding as Ethics Enforcement Forum Occasionally, government ethics enforcement spills out from ethics and criminal proceedings into other types of proceeding. Since Maricopa County's officials have managed to turn ethics and criminal enforcement into a form of internecine war…

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