Conflicts

Everyone knows about ambulance-chasing lawyers, but until reading <a href="http://citizensvoice.com/news/ethics-code-would-ban-coroner-s-employees…; target="”_blank”">an
article in today's <i>Citizens' Voice</i> of Luzerne County</a> (PA), I had
never heard of hearse-chasing deputy coroners. Maybe I would have known

Yesterday, the Ninth Circuit, in <a href="http://articles.law360.s3.amazonaws.com/0253000/253524/10-10088.pdf&quot; target="”_blank”">its
decision in <i>U.S. v Renzi</i></a>, considered what constitutes a
"legislative act" with respect to the constitutional Speech or Debate

According to the Wisconsin Supreme Court majority, a state legislature
does not have to follow ethics laws, even ethics laws expressly
designed to meet constitutional requirements. This shocking statement
comes from <a href="http://www.wicourts.gov/sc/opinion/DisplayDocument.html?content=html&se…; target="”_blank”">the
opinion

The dream of every ethics commission is to have a guaranteed budget.
But it is not really a dream for two reasons. One, there are ethics
commissions with guaranteed budgets. And two, it is a reasonable policy
that can be countered only by a local legislative body's need for
control. This blog post will look at the arguments for and against a
guaranteed budget, as well as several examples of and approaches to
guaranteeing budgets for ethics commissions and similar independent
bodies and agencies.<br>
<br>

At the very end of last year, a grand jury filed a report that found a great deal of
corruption in Florida's state and local governments, and made numerous
recommendations for ethics reform (see <a href="http://www.cityethics.org/content/grand-jury-report-florida-recommends-…; target="”_blank”">my blog post on the report</a>). This provided the perfect

Government ethics is dangerous to dating and weddings. That's the
message of <a href="http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/palm-beach-county-ethics-rules-would-…; target="”_blank”">an
article in Sunday's Palm Beach <i>Post</i></a>.<br>
<br>

In <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/21/opinion/l21elect.html?_r=1&ref=opinio…; target="”_blank”">a
letter
to the editor in yesterday's New York <i>Times</i></a>, two lawyers who
represent clients seeking to gut Arizona's Citizens Clean Elections
public campaign financing program end by calling Arizona's program "a
vision of unconstitutional
dystopia, not free speech."<br>

It's always nice to know that your discipline is at the heart of what
it means to be human. <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/15/science/15humans.html&quot; target="”_blank”">In
Tuesday's New York <i>Times</i> Science Section</a>,
Nicholas Wade wrote:<ul>

What politicians say about a government ethics issue is sometimes so devoid of a basic
understanding of government ethics that it's hard to believe that they
are not being willfully ignorant (i.e., not discussing ethics matters
with ethics professionals) or cynically disingenuous. If only there
could be some requirement that, before an official opens his or her
mouth to say something about government ethics, he or she actually
discussed the matter with someone who does understand it. Not any

The U.S. is not the only country with a revolving-door problem. In
Japan, the problem is deeply institutionalized. It is as much a part of
the retirement system as pensions.<br>
<br>
But the Japanese name for the revolving door shows that not only does
the system work in a different
manner than ours, but that the Japanese have a different opinion of the
relative value of government and business. The name is <i>amakudari</i>, which means "descent