Book Reviews

I don't know how I failed to hear about this novel. Maybe I'm the last one on the block to do so, but it's been four years since T. Jefferson Parker's The Fallen was published. This detective novel involves the murder of an investigator for San Diego's "Ethics Authority," who falls from the sixth story of a hotel (must have been at a COGEL conference).

In the October 28 issue of the New York Review of Books, there is an essay by the excellent South African novelist J. M. Coetzee on Philip Roth's series of four novels, concluding with the brand new one, Nemesis. Coetzee shows how Roth has dealt in these novels with the classical concept of Nemesis, "the...

Meredith McGehee wrote a thought-provoking Campaign Legal Center blog post yesterday about the upside of election time ethics attacks on opponents.

"Current political thinking generally laments this development, arguing that it cheapens the process and puts all politicians in a bad light." But she sees it as a good development. I don't...

Two years ago, I wrote a blog post about a book by Lewis Hyde entitled The Gift, which had a lot to say, philosophically, about gift-giving and -receiving, an issue of relevance to government ethics. I just finished Hyde's book...

In order to develop their identities, and cement the loyalties of their members, organizations tend to contrast themselves with other organizations, and with those they deal with, whether they are clients, customers, or citizens. Bailey wrote, “If contact with outsiders is experienced as painful and involves rejection, organizational solidarity is likely to be enhanced." In other words, in the local government context, seeing citizens as irritants creates solidarity.

One of the problems in talking about conflicts of interest is that we tend to assume that people with conflicts analyze their situations before acting. We think that, for example, they balance acting in their personal interest, or in the interest of a family member or business associate, against the consequences of getting caught. Or we think that the principal ethical considerations they bring to bear on their situation arise from their local code of ethics or their spiritual or philosophical...