In the news

Whenever someone dies in a village in Bangladesh, Gonoshasthaya Kendra, a health charity, holds a public post-mortem, according to an article in the July 7, 2007 issue of the Economist. 'The aim is not to blame or indict per se'bare-knuckled confrontation would alienate the government'but to remind public servants that someone is watching them, and that the negligent will be named and shamed.'

In the United States, when people want to do a public post-mortem involving...

According to a 33-count indictment filed yesterday by the United States Attorney for New Jersey, former Newark, NJ mayor Sharpe James appears to have been just another crooked urban mayor out to help himself and his friends to the sort of perks that aren't supposed to come with public service: trips, tickets, cruises, the usual.

What is sad about this particular instance of corruption is that James is a folk...

An excellent op-ed column by Stanley Fish in the July 14 New York Times focuses on a very difficult ethical problem in municipal government: affirmative action. The recently decided Supreme Court decision, Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 et al (No. 05-908), concluded that the 14th amendment's equal protection guarantee of treating each citizen as an individual, rather than as a...

Many municipal ethics codes have a provision similar to this one:

Contingent Fees
No official or employee may retain, or be retained by, anyone to solicit or secure a contract with the town upon an agreement or understanding that includes a commission, percentage, brokerage, or contingent fee, except with respect to attorneys hired to represent the town on a common contingency fee basis.

I had never thought twice about the exception for attorneys who work on a...

According to a May 24, 2007 New York Times editorial, the Commerce Department inspector general, charged with protecting whistle-blowers, took vengeance on two subordinates who questioned his expense accounts. He reassigned his top deputy and his counsel to peripheral jobs, when they refused to sign off on expensive trips and office renovations. This happened at the federal level, but it is important to show how fragile whistle-blowing is.

No one, not mayors, not city...

If you had no knowledge of government ethics, and you were asked what, on a day-to-day, moment-to-moment basis, was the most frequent form of unethical behavior in municipal government, you might say 'passing rumors along.' That's the meat and the potatoes of every organization's conversations, and it's only the most self-controlled of us who don't partake in producing, consuming, and passing along rumors, at least occasionally.

We know rumor mongering is wrong, even as we do it. But...