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Local Government Practice February 5, 2010

Novel Approaches to Local Government Corruption in India and China

India and China have not only been the home of new varieties of entrepreneurialism. In these countries, creative individuals have also come up with novel approaches to dealing with local government corruption. An expatriate Indian physics professor in the U.S. came up with the brilliant idea of a Z…
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February 4, 2010

Florida EC Chair Calls for Some Wheels

Cheryl Forchilli, chair of the Florida Commission on Ethics (which deals with local government ethics), wrote a must-read op-ed piece that appeared on the Florida Thinks blog yesterday. Forchilli's piece begins with a nice simile: If a sports car barreling down the interstate at 120 miles an hour p…
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Resources & Learning February 4, 2010

The Legitimacy of Power and the Sense of Entitlement

It is a truism of government ethics that a sense of entitlement is an important cause of unethical conduct. People who feel entitled to the power they wield feel they have the right to deviate from ethical norms in ways others do not (see my blog post on this topic). Now there is research that supp…
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February 3, 2010

One Chicago Alderman Goes to Prison, The Rest Claim Legislative Immunity

Never a dull moment in Chicago. According to an article in the Chicago Tribune, a now-former alderman has pleaded guilty to bribery and tax fraud charges relating to $40,000 in work done on his home by a developer whose development he backed. This makes him the 29th Chicago alderman to be convicted…
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February 3, 2010

An IG-Compliance Battle in Chicago

Update: February 19, 2010 (see below) This blog post is about Chicago, and things are more complicated in Chicago than in other American municipalities. So please read slowly and carefully. According to an article in yesterday's Chicago Tribune, the first deputy in the mayor's Office of Compliance …
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Ethics Commissions & Administration February 2, 2010

EC Members and the Law-Ethics Distinction

Should ethics commission members follow ethics laws to the letter, and no further, or should they provide leadership and a role model by going beyond legalism and instead acting ethically? State EC members in New York and Georgia are telling the world by their actions and their words that only the …
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Local Government Practice February 2, 2010

Caring About Process

When the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives says, "the American people don’t care about process" in a news conference (the context was the process surrounding the health care bill), this topic, which is central not only to government ethics, but to our legal and political system, is worth…
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Ethics Commissions & Administration February 1, 2010

An EC's Immune System

Update: December 10, 2010 (see below) After all I've written about the immunity courts have given legislators from enforcement actions by ethics commissions, I now can write about a court decision that gives ethics commissions and their staff immunity from suits by respondents in ethics enforcement…
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Conflicts of Interest February 1, 2010

Conflicting City-County Positions Where One Is Not Technically a Government Position

Update: February 5, 2010 (see below) Here's an interesting dual position question, that is, a question involving one individual holding two government positions. The most important conflict involved in dual positions is that you cannot consistently fulfill your fiduciary obligations to one constitu…
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Ethics Codes & Reform January 30, 2010

Best Practice #1

Cities across the United States are creating and expanding Ethics Commissions, Ethics Offices and Inspector Generals in order to fight corruption and establish higher ethical standards for their governments. I will be posting some of the best ideas from these programs on this site. If you have comm…
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