The reason I haven't written about George Anderson is that he has done too much, and been too controversial, for me to get a handle on him. In other words, laziness. He has been an ethics and non-ethics watchdog in Georgia for many years, filing numerous ethics and other sorts of complaints both at…

It took a law student doing a summer job, but there is finally confirmation of what I have been saying for a long time:  normal people do not understand the word "interest" as it is commonly used by lawyers in the government ethics context. It was for this reason that I rarely use the word "interes…

Local government ethics can quickly become an ugly circus when officials don't really understand it. A good example occurred in Royal Oak, Michigan last week, when a city commissioner who had recently pointed out a legitimate conflict situation involving a fellow commissioner took an "ethics pledge…

One of the wonderful things about local government ethics is that every mayor or county executive feels qualified to act as if he was establishing the first local government ethics program ever. It's sort of like choosing what will go in a bento box, except that there are no rules (e.g., only one s…