Model Code

Type the word "ethics" into the Birmingham, AL website search box and nothing comes up. Nor can you find the city's ordinances. Mayor Larry Langford bills himself as a great reformer, but he certainly hasn't done anything to reform the city's ethics laws, or at least to let anyone know about them. In fact, according to the City Ethics site, the ethics ordinance and board used to be on the city website, but the links no longer work...

There are two principal ways of dealing with gifts to government officials and employees, and both of them are unsatisfactory, although certainly better than ignoring them completely. One approach is prohibition, the other disclosure.

Gift disclosure and limitations are an important part of government ethics. But rarely do we think of what gifts mean. Usually this goes little further than politicians saying, "I can't be bought."

But gifts aren't about buying. In fact, gifts are the opposite of buying, according to Lewis Hyde in his 1983 book, The...

Most ethics codes effectively define a conflict of interest as a conflict between an official's personal financial interest and an official's obligation to the public interest. But this leaves out an enormous number of personal interests, many of which are themselves financial, including the financial interests of family members, business associates, and favorite charities.

Gift provisions often make it a violation for immediate family members to accept gifts from those doing...

A controversy currently going on in Fairfield, CT reminded me that one of the more easily misunderstood provisions of an ethics code is the special consideration, preferential treatment, or favoritism provision. The version in the City Ethics Model Code reads as follows:

While we're in Nevada, there's another interesting case before the state's ethics commission that has ramifications for local government ethics. According to an article in the Las Vegas Review-Journal, a probable cause hearing was to be conducted by one Democratic and one Republican commission member. When it turned out that the case had been brought by the executive director of the state Democratic party committee (against...