Misuse of Office/Special

Yet another brief has been filed in the Carrigan v. Commission on Ethics of the State of Nevada case, this time the EC's supplemental brief on remand to the Nevada Supreme Court.

The principal issue discussed in this brief is vagueness, which has stood in the background behind First Amendment issues of free...

What can be done when a public agency that gives gifts to public officials destroys its gift records?

This question arises from an article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution last week about the Alpharetta (GA) Convention and Visitors Bureau, an independent agency funded partially by a local hotel tax. According to the article, the bureau's CEO destroyed her records...

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.

A lot of interesting issues have arisen with respect to Santa Fe's Ethics and Campaign Review Board.

A Majority of Lawyers on an Ethics Board
First, a new selection process was created, and the ethics board members were replaced some time between the July and August meetings. Instead of having council members individually select ethics board members, which was a terrible idea, now a local bar...

Once again, an elected official in the national eye took an opportunity to teach the public about government ethics and used it solely to distort government ethics and defend himself.

The official is Texas Governor Rick Perry who, according to an article in yesterday's New York Daily News, was...

The situation where New York City's mayor misrepresented the reason for the resignation of one of his deputy mayors in order to protect his privacy regarding a domestic dispute raises some interesting issues about transparency, favoritism, and the extent to which the private should be made public.