Blogs

Sometimes, conflict of interest matters come disguised as election law matters. Most of the time, due to secrecy, laziness, or an inability to draw lines between the dots, no one recognizes the conflict of interest matter. But sometimes, someone gives the game away, and it becomes clear how inextricable the two areas can be.

According to an article in...

Crowdfunding is a 21st-century way of funding projects that are not being funded by the government, the stock market, venture capitalists, or even angel investors. But it's really not as 21st-century as people think. For example, the Statue of Liberty's pedestal was crowdfunded back in 1885 (without the Internet, the crowdfunding was led by Joseph Pulitzer, the publisher of New York World newspaper).

Very few local government ethics programs are funded at all, and those that...

A month ago, I wrote about some problems Honolulu's ethics program was having with the corporation counsel. The problems have continued. The big issue this last week has been the corporation counsel's provision of ethics advice. So far, the argument has primarily taken place in the form of memos.

The corporation counsel responded in an October 25 memo to questions directed to it by the...

I've been writing a lot about government ethics and behavioral psychology over the last few years. I consider some of the findings of behavioral psychology, especially about blind spots, essential to understanding what leads to ethical misconduct and, therefore, essential to ethics training, ethics advice, and ethics enforcement. But behavioral psychology has not yet been embraced by American government ethics programs, at least as far as I have seen.

The first reason that comes to...

A recent Miami Herald article describes a case that embodies a number of important government ethics issues, including the conflict issues that involve local schools of higher education, gifts to officials' relatives and the officials' knowledge of them, an ethics program's jurisdiction over these relatives, and whether government attorneys should provide...

A "resign to run" law is an unusual sort of conflicts of interest law. It requires that before an elected official runs for a different office, she resign from her current office. Philadelphia's "resign to run" law is one of the most onerous ones. According to the Committee of Seventy, a Philadelphia good government organization, other cities that have such laws, such as Phoenix and...