Complaints/ Investigations/Hearings

According to an article in Parsippany (NJ) Life, a Parsippany school board member filed an ethics complaint against himself with the state's School Ethics Commission. Is this odd course of action the best way to bring transparency to the school board, an institutional rather than personal problem?

Imagine this story. A mayor calls a group of local contractors and developers to a closed meeting on furthering economic growth in the city. The guests are given a welcome pack, and in the welcome pack is a plain brown, unmarked envelope. The mayor ran on a platform of stopping corruption, but the contractors and developers have seen this happen before. Politicians are all the same, they think.

During the meeting, the mayor asks her guests to open the envelopes. Inside the...

This third blog post on Philip Zimbardo's book The Lucifer Effect looks at some ways to deal with situational forces.

Recognizing Our Limitations
One of the college students who played a guard in the Stanford Prison Experiment said later, "I was actually beginning to feel like a guard and...

A year and a half ago, I wrote a blog post about a 2007 book by Philip Zimbardo, entitled The Lucifer Effect. I had read about Zimbardo's book in another book, Susan Neiman's...

Legal Disciplinary Proceeding as Ethics Enforcement Forum
Occasionally, government ethics enforcement spills out from ethics and criminal proceedings into other types of proceeding. Since Maricopa County's officials have managed to turn ethics and criminal enforcement into a form of internecine warfare, the state's lawyer disciplinary program has gotten into the action.

Another serious problem posed by making a legislative immunity defense in the local government ethics context can be seen from reading the recommendation of the investigating panel of the Stamford (CT) board of ethics. In the section that provides reasons for dismissal of a complaint brought against a council member, the panel wrote:

The case also presents significant legal...