Advisory Opinions

Thinking in terms of risk is a great way not to take responsibility for your actions, including your inactions. As soon as you start thinking about the chances that, overall, you might win or lose from a transaction, you have begun thinking in terms of your personal interest. This makes it very difficult to think in terms of the public interest.

One of the great things about discussions of the conflicts of interest of people in the securities world is that "fiduciary duty" is considered the basis for the rules that govern their relationship with government officials and others. In discussions of the conflicts of interest of those whom they deal with in municipal governments and those who provide other sorts of advice or products to municipal governments, "fiduciary duty" often goes unmentioned.

Many government ethics professionals don't like waivers. I think they're valuable. Basically, they are requests for an advisory opinion in which the official recognizes that certain conduct would constitute an ethics violation, but wants a determination that he can engage in the conduct due to special circumstances. The result of such a determination is the creation of a new, narrow exception to a rule. This is a good way of preventing bad unforeseen consequences of a rule. But waivers must be given only after a public hearing.

A conflict situation in my state of Connecticut is instructive regarding a basic concept of government ethics, as well as a basic concept of legislative immunity.

Legislators insist that they require immunity because their motives in making decisions cannot be questioned outside their body. Government ethics, on the other hand, does not consider motive, only conduct and relationships. This is one of the principal reasons why I argue that legislative immunity does not protect legislators from government ethics enforcement.

I thought that I had covered all the blind spots that wreak such havoc on local government ethics (see the section in my book Local Government Ethics Programs). But Dennis J.

Here's a good-news story from Delray Beach, FL. But first the bad news.

"'Public Service Must Begin at Home': The Lawyer as Civics Teacher in Everyday Practice" by Bruce A. Green and Russell G. Pearce (William & Mary Law Review, Vol. 50, p. 1207, 2009) provides an excellent basis for something that I consider extremely important to government ethics, but with which many government ethics practitioners disagree:  going beyond the law in the provision of government ethics advice (sometimes known as "wise counsel").

Sometimes Withdrawal and Formal Processes Are Not Enough
It never looks good when a high-level elected official gets a job with the government while in office or soon after leaving office. It looks like he got the job because of his influence and relationships with those who made the decision.

This is the second of four blog posts on Florida Senate Bill 606 (attached; see below), one of the worst ethics reform bills I have ever read (click here to read the first post, which focused on a provision that provides an additional penalty on complainants in order to reduce the number of ethics complaints).

Gift Reporting vs. Gift Banning

Some jurisdictions have an ethics provision entitled Prestige of Office that, among other things, limits work that officials can do outside of government. Here is the language that the Baltimore school district uses (this is essentially the same as the city government's Prestige of Office provision, but with the addition of the phrase "public position," which turns it into a basic misuse of office provision):

An official may not intentionally use the prestige of office or public position for the private gain of that official or the private gain of another.

It's certa