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Lobbyists, lawmakers, and charitable fundraising form a triangle that is both virtuous and harmful.

Community leaders like to be identified with charitable groups, and charitable groups like to be identified with community leaders. It's a natural combination. But what is not natural, or even easy to see, is the line between charitable fundraising and campaign fundraising, when lobbyists, contractors, and developers enter into the picture.

The typical problem involves a mayor's...

Here's a difficult case involving a board of education's attorney.

The board of education in a wealthy, medium-sized Connecticut town is represented by a large law firm that represents 80 boards of education across the state (half the state's total). That same firm is representing a developer that is suing the town's planning and zoning commission, and it appears to be a controversial matter.

There is no doubt that the state's rules of professional conduct allow a firm to...

Understatement: After one county district attorney recused himself from prosecuting the man who hired him for his job, the neighboring county district attorney accepted the case, despite the fact that he leased office space and had accepted a thousand-dollar campaign contribution from the suspect's nephew, who happened to be listed as the suspect's defense attorney. 'To suggest that that's a conflict of interest is to suggest that I have an integrity problem, which is simply not the...

My blog entries must often seem like attacks on business interests. One reason is that conflicts are usually about personal financial interests conflicting with a government official's obligations to the public, and our democratic values require that the official's fiduciary obligations take precedence. And where there are financial interests, there are usually businesses.

But that is not always the case. Obligations themselves can conflict, without any direct financial interest. The...

You don't hear too much about recidivism in the municipal ethics world. One reason may be that it happens, but often at different levels, as a politician moves up the ladder.

Take Congressional Representative Gary Miller, for instance. According to a recent article in The Hill, he got his start when he was a member of the Diamond Bar (CA) City Council. In his role as council member, he...