Ethics Reform and Ethics Environments This weekend, the Press-Enterprise ran an excellent editorial about ethics reform in San Bernardino County. Not only do the editors recognize that watered-down, "symbolic" ethics reform is worthless, but they also recognize that even valuable ethics reform, suc…

Update - July 31, 2009 - see below In my April blog post about the legislative immunity defense made by a former Baltimore council member (now the mayor), I felt that her arguments didn't have a chance. Well, I was wrong. I was wrong primarily because I thought that a state prosecutor would be dete…

We here in the U.S. like to think of Canadians as like us, but better. More honest, less greedy, more accepting of diversity, etc. And they pay for it by being dull. In the realm of government ethics, this sadly isn't true. At least in Montreal. According to a recent article in The Economist, Montr…

The Rhode Island Supreme Court has reached a decision on the legislative immunity case (Irons v. RI Ethics Commission) involving the state ethics commission and the state legislature. As expected, its majority opinion (it was a 3-1 split) concluded that the state's Speech in Debate Clause 100% over…

It's not easy to publicize ethical and unethical activity in a responsible manner. And when this is done, it can sometimes lead to false attacks on the the legitimacy of the organization doing the publicizing. This is what happened this week in Colorado. Colorado Ethics Watch published an Ethics Ro…