Ethics Commissions/Administration

Update: September 17, 2011 (see below)

An article in yesterday's Stamford Advocate keeps asking the question, Who should pay? The article is referring to attorney's fees related to an ethics proceeding. Most ethics codes do not deal with this issue, and therefore it often turns into a big political controversy after the fact, leaving a...

There are two morals to the following story. One involves law, the other ethics.

Last August, the Nevada Policy Research Institute ran a long commentary on the fact that Nevada's 17 school superintendents were not filing financial disclosure statements with the state ethics commission, something required of all the state's "public officers." Even though the superintendents met...

Kerry Cavanaugh, a Los Angeles Daily News columnist, got it wrong when she started a recent column, "Here's another reminder that politicians are not like you or me. If I get caught taking inappropriate gifts or violating the company's ethics policy, I might be fired, suspended without pay or forced to open my wallet to pay the penalty. If a politician gets caught breaking the rules on the job, he or she can...

Here's a situation from Lafayette Parish, a city of 220,000 in south-central Louisiana, which shows how when one official fails to deal responsibly with his conflicts, he is likely to be complicit in helping other officials deal irresponsibly with their conflicts and with those of their colleagues. When this official is a government attorney, it can cause an entire board or agency to deal irresponsibly with a conflict.

I've written many blog posts about various cases where the legislative immunity defense has been made, but I haven't pulled together in one post the three alternative, preventative approaches local governments can take to deal with the issue of legislative immunity before anyone raises it as a defense. It is far better, and far less expensive, to prevent local legislators from raising the defense of legislative immunity than it is to litigate this complex issue. It is also damaging to the...

In my last post, I dealt with the many arguments against application of the attorney-client privilege in the context of an inspector general, or ethics commission, investigation of official misconduct. One thing I did not do was respond to the general argument in favor of attorney-client privilege.