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New York politicians are making life hard for ethical politicians. “Present yourself as ethical,” they are effectively telling them, “and everyone will be harder on you when you don’t live up to expectations. Better to create no expectations at all.”

This isn’t what the government ethics community wants to hear.

The new example of an ethical politician caught with her pants down is New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, as we learned from...

Not all municipal ethics problems arise from a municipality. One place where there is a great deal of opportunity for municipal misconduct is the Department of Housing and Urban Development in Washington, D.C. (HUD)

HUD oversees and funds housing authorities across the country. It gets involved, directly and indirectly, in land and development deals and contracts.

As with so many other agencies, the people who run HUD come from the same world as the people they oversee and...

In an upcoming book, The Rule of Law and Development, Michael Trebilcock and Ron Daniels divide developing countries into three groups (according to an article in last week’s Economist):

1. Those where politicians, lawyers, and the public all support legal reform (e.g., Central Europe after the end of communism);
2. Those where politicians support legal reform, but lawyers and the police do...

The following appeared in a recent op-ed column in the Los Angeles Times by a young doctor, SreyRam Kuy. The issue was a health insurer asking doctors to report patient conditions that might be used to cancel health insurance.

“Physicians hold a trust to protect the health of our patients. We cannot abdicate this sacred trust. ... That a person would allow me to take a scalpel and slice into his...

There is an assumption held by people involved in government ethics that putting one’s personal interests ahead of the public interest is bad, that a healthy democracy depends on government officials working for the public interest rather than for themselves.

But not everyone holds this view. In fact, the prevalence of the opposite view provides a great deal of support to unethical conduct, especially at the local government level.

...

How harmful can it be for a potential contractor to give money to the favored charities of someone who oversees a county’s finances? And how harmful can it be for a county official to work with people he trusts, rather than competitively bidding out the county’s business?

The answer to both questions, given by the disaster that's hit Jefferson County, Alabama, home to the city of Birmingham, is a lot.

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