Ethics Environments

Former Maricopa County, AZ county attorney Andrew Thomas (with one of his assistants) was disbarred on Tuesday on numerous counts related to bringing false charges against other county officials over a period of years, according to an article in yesterday's Arizona Republic. According to Prof. Bennett Gershman of Pace University, "...

I never know where I'm going to find something that inspires a blog post on local government ethics. This time it was an essay by Tim Parks in the March 8 issue of the New York Review of Books, as well as on the NYRBlog. The essay is about Italy, and the possibility for change in its government, economy, and culture. Parks, a British novelist and once literary translator from Italian into...

On Saturday, I attended a one-day conference on Institutional Corruption sponsored by the Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University (videos of it will eventually appear here). Although local government was scarcely mentioned (there was one image of a painting that portrayed the 1930s machine in Kansas City, MO), many ideas that were discussed are applicable to local government ethics.

I...

It's not every day that a neighboring town makes the front page of the New York Times. It's especially surprising when the reason is, at heart, a local government ethics problem.

The town is East Haven, CT (most recently in the national news for a part of it being overrun by waves during Hurricane Irene), and the problem ostensibly...

Henry Adams' 1880 novel Democracy is a must-read for those interested in government ethics. It's also a first-rate novel, full of wit, excellent writing, and a good portrayal of post-Civil War Washington. It's available free from Project Gutenberg, in six e-book formats.

The climax of the novel is an exchange between the Secretary of the Treasury (Ratcliffe, formerly a senator) and the novel's protagonist (...

Lawrence Lessig's excellent new book Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress—and a Plan to Stop It (Twelve, Oct. 5, 2011) is about Congress and mostly about campaign finance, but it is also an important look at institutional corruption that has some valuable things to say that are relevant to local government ethics.

Lessig, who is director...