Ethics Commissions/Administration

(Update: March 1, 2010: Also see this excellent Times-Union editorial on the importance of an independent ethics commission that has authority over independent authorities. A particularly valuable observation: "The city Ethics Commission needs the ability to obtain independent legal advice. The city General Counsel's Office advises the mayor, City Council and the Ethics...

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.
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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 letter of the law matters in government ethics.

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 actions, in this case one for defamation against an ethics board's executive director. The respondent in this case, however, is not a legislator, but a losing candidate for...

Assuming you can learn a lot from the mistakes made in local government ethics matters in cities and towns other than your own, there is a great deal to learn from a simple ethics matter that, through a number of mistakes, oversights and, apparently, partisanship has been turned into a big issue in the city of Torrington (CT; pop. 36,000). There's also a lesson to be learned about the confidentiality of ethics commission decisions.

Can the government ethics enforcement community learn anything from a successful experiment in the crime enforcement field? With tongue only partly in cheek, I will try to show ways in which the government ethics enforcement community could learn a thing or two.

This week's New York Times Magazine ran an excellent piece by Jeffrey Rosen on a...