Conflicts of Interest

Yesterday, the Ninth Circuit, in its decision in U.S. v Renzi, considered what constitutes a "legislative act" with respect to the constitutional Speech or Debate Clause, which provides legislative immunity to legislators by preventing the executive and judicial branches from investigating or heari…

Update: June 30, 2011 (see below) One thing you can say for James Bopp, Jr. (an attorney who has taken many campaign finance cases to the Supreme Court for organizations that oppose certain campaign finance regulations) is that he doesn't beat around the bush. He's a straight shooter. The problem i…

Just because it happens in New York City doesn't mean it will happen in the average city or, especially, town. Right? No, it can happen, only the numbers will probably be smaller. Two situations described in today's New York Times, both of them effectively centered on the hiring and failure to over…

The Supreme Court reached a decision today in the Carrigan case, and it is nearly unanimous. However, it deals with only one part of the arguments made by Carrigan (see my blog post on the oral argument): whether a local legislative vote is protected speech under the First Amendment. The answer is …

It's nice when something you write about in a blog shows up on the front page of the New York Times the following day. Yesterday, in a post called "Privatization and Transparency," I discussed new types of privatization involving nonprofits, which raise new sorts of problems. One type of nonprofit …

Government ethics is dangerous to dating and weddings. That's the message of an article in Sunday's Palm Beach Post. Because the proposed amendment to the Palm Beach County ethics code's gift provision, just like the current provision (§2-444), does not make an exception for people who are dating, …

In March, I wrote a blog post about a nepotism situation in Valparaiso, IN. The city's ethics commission found that the hiring of the fire chief's son would be in violation of the ethics code, because the chief would be directly involved in personnel matters involving his son. According to an NWI T…

There are two morals to the following story. One involves law, the other ethics. Last August, the Nevada Policy Research Institute ran a long commentary on the fact that Nevada's 17 school superintendents were not filing financial disclosure statements with the state ethics commission, something re…

I was just reading a review in The Economist of Francis Fukayama's new book, The Origins of Political Order. The review made me think differently about nepotism, a government ethics issue that is usually considered rather minor. Some people may know that the Catholic Church instituted priestly celi…

Here's a situation from Lafayette Parish, a city of 220,000 in south-central Louisiana, which shows how when one official fails to deal responsibly with his conflicts, he is likely to be complicit in helping other officials deal irresponsibly with their conflicts and with those of their colleagues.…