Local Government Attorneys

I did a huge amount of reading this summer for a paper I wrote for the journal Public Integrity (and otherwise). The first piece of reading I'm going to talk about is one of the otherwise.

Over the weekend, I read a March 2010 draft of Rebecca Roiphe's law review article "The Ethics of Willful Ignorance," which appeared in the Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics, Volume 24, Issue 1 (Winter 2011).

The Schumpeter column in this week's Economist talks about the corporate chief legal officer (CLO), who due to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act's requirements has become a major figure at the top of every big corporation. Much as the city or county attorney is a major figure at the top of every local government.

Music to my ears in an order yesterday from the federal court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin, in a case involving an unsuccessful attempt by certain Wisconsin state legislators to claim the attorney-client privilege with respect to documents relating to redistricting. What resonates so nicely is the way the court considered state citizens to be the client of the private lawyer.

According to a letter (attached; see below) from a Fort Lauderdale attorney hired to provide a second opinion on the constitutionality of a lobbying provision in the proposed Broward County ethics code, the Broward county attorney (who wrote the first opinion) has decided not to continue seeking a declaratory judgment due to its cost to the county and the likelihood that a decision would be too late to serve its purpose (see my recent blog post<

Georgia seems intent on providing an entire course on the ethical obligations of government attorneys. This time it's the obligations of the state's top government attorney, the attorney general. There's also an issue concerning special government attorneys.

The governor wants to file a suit to challenge the constitutionality of the federal health care reform bill. The elected attorney general says that it's unlikely to be successful, and would be a waste of state resources.

Lawyers are supposed to zealously represent their clients. After all, Canon 7 of the ABA Code of Professional Responsibility says, "A lawyer should represent a client zealously within the bounds of the law." This requirement applies as much to government lawyers as it does to private lawyers, right?

When Mayor John Peyton decided to hire Carla Miller as Jacksonville’s Ethics Officer in 2007, the city was in crisis. A grand jury was investigating violations of state open-meeting laws by nearly every member of the former City Council. The FBI had begun sniffing around JaxPort, probing dubious contracts and allegations of influence peddling. The city had spent $36.5 million to develop the old Shipyards site, with nothing to show for it. It had spent another $26.8 million on the courthouse with similar results.

BY SUSAN COOPER EASTMAN

February 3, 2009