Ethics Commissions & Administration

The American Bar Association Journal does a list of the best law-related blogs each year, and I thought I'd ask my readers to help get this list to work for a good cause: getting more lawyers to learn about local government ethics. City Ethics will get nothing out of being named to the list. To see…

Looking at government ethics through the appearance standard, as Dennis Thompson did in his book Ethics in Congress: From Individual to Institutional Corruption, reveals the great importance of independence to ethics advice and enforcement. No one is in a worse position to see appearances of improp…

How many hats can a local government attorney wear when it comes to government ethics? This question arises out of a state bar grievance filed against Houston's city attorney by a member of the city council. According to an article in the Houston Chronicle last week, the council member alleged that…

For Independence Day, here's a blog post that pulls together all past blog posts on ethics commission independence. EC independence is essential to an effective and respected ethics program, and yet a small minority of ECs are truly independent. Those individuals seeking to make their city or count…

When an ethics commission and its staff are at odds, and the commission is dealing with complaints against high-level officials, it is always best for everyone when those officials had nothing to do with the selection of the ethics commission's members or its staff. In other words, you never fully …

Last week, Wisconsin taught us the lesson that even when you go to great lengths to ensure a nonpartisan, independent ethics body, there will be politicians who accuse it of being partisan when it makes decisions against their interests. The good thing is that, when the body is truly nonpartisan an…

The dream of every ethics commission is to have a guaranteed budget. But it is not really a dream for two reasons. One, there are ethics commissions with guaranteed budgets. And two, it is a reasonable policy that can be countered only by a local legislative body's need for control. This blog post …

Kerry Cavanaugh, a Los Angeles Daily News columnist, got it wrong when she started a recent column, "Here's another reminder that politicians are not like you or me. If I get caught taking inappropriate gifts or violating the company's ethics policy, I might be fired, suspended without pay or force…

I've written many blog posts about various cases where the legislative immunity defense has been made, but I haven't pulled together in one post the three alternative, preventative approaches local governments can take to deal with the issue of legislative immunity before anyone raises it as a defe…

When there is a time period in an ethics code investigation or hearing provision, there is always the question:  What happens if some event does not take place within the designated time period? Does that mean that the complaint is automatically dismissed? This issue arises due to a Pennsylvania Co…