Local Government Attorneys

I've written about the issue of ethics commission jurisdiction over independent agencies and authorities, which arose in recent years in such places as Jacksonville, Louisville, and Palm Beach and Broward counties in Florida. The issue has arisen again in Broward County, in a different and interesting context.

According to...

There is a great deal to be learned from the selection process for the new District of Columbia Board of Ethics and Government Accountability, which is effectively complete. Three weeks ago, I wrote a blog post about the nomination of Robert Spagnoletti to be chair of the new ethics board. I questioned this nomination of a former D.C. Attorney General (that is, city...

There is a section of my new book Local Government Ethics Programs (click and scroll down to subsection 9) on the need for more transparency in the provision of ethics advice. What I just realized is that this is another government ethics topic on which Stephen Colbert, who has...

Yesterday was the 40th anniversary of the Watergate break-in. For those too young to remember, President Nixon's re-election campaign had people break in to the Democratic National Committee's offices in the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C.

According to an editorial in the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette yesterday, one of the lesser known people involved in the break-in...

Over the weekend, I read a March 2010 draft of Rebecca Roiphe's law review article "The Ethics of Willful Ignorance," which appeared in the Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics, Volume 24, Issue 1 (Winter 2011).

Willful (or deliberate) ignorance (or blindness) describes what happens when someone has reason to believe...

For the second time in a year, a local ethics commission has been the subject of a grand jury report. The first was San Francisco's (see my blog post). There, it was a civil grand jury and the focus was on the commission. Here and now, it is a criminal grand jury, and the focus is on the county executive and other officials, as well as ethics commission members. The...