Ethics Codes

In Louisiana, local government officials cannot do any sort of business with anyone who does business with their local government. This position is supported by a settlement reached with an Alexandria council member, according to an article at thetowntalk.com. The charges are...

It appears that Jackson County (MO) legislators will allow the county ethics commission to have jurisdiction over them, after a very ugly series of incidents, including the resignation of the entire ethics commission and the false presentation of the jurisdiction issue at the meeting where the new ethics code was passed, just a couple of months ago.

Here's a short opinion piece by Walter Dellinger, head of the Office of Legal Counsel under Pres. Clinton. It's part of a series of such pieces that will appear in tomorrow's Washington Post. The opinions concern what Pres. Obama should be looking for in his first Supreme Court nominee. After Dellinger's opinion piece, I tie his ideas into...

When I saw the lead headline in Wednesday's New York Times, "In Adopting Harsh Tactics, No Inquiry into Past Use," I thought of local government ethics, even though the article was about torture. Okay, I suppose I spend too much time thinking about local government ethics, but bear with me for a minute.

The C.I.A. used, and the Justice Department approved, interrogation methods that were used in American military training. If the methods are there, in print, in a...

Update below:
The controversy in Baltimore over the mayor's acceptance of gifts from a developer whose companies have received a great deal of funding from the city appears now to be focused on whether or not the mayor was required to disclose these gifts, since the developer did not personally do business with the city.

One of the biggest problems people have with government ethics is acknowledging the difference between ethics enforcement and ethics practice. Ethics enforcement is legal. You cannot enforce rules that are not in the law. But when it comes to ethics practice, the law represents only the minimum requirement. The law is what you have to do, but an official can be more ethical, more open, more responsible than what is required. Officials have fiduciary duties that go far beyond the...