Many government ethics professionals don't like waivers. I think
they're valuable. Basically, they are requests for an advisory
opinion in which the official recognizes that certain conduct would
constitute an ethics violation, but wants a determination that he
can engage in the conduct due to special circumstances. The
result of such a determination is the creation of a new, narrow
exception to a rule. This is a good way of preventing bad unforeseen

According to <a href="http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20140501/BLOGS04/140509993/speaker…; target="”_blank”">a
post in the <i>Crain</i>'s Insider blog last week</a>, the New
York City council hired as deputy general counsel a lobbyist whose

There is nothing more natural and, in most circumstances, ethical
than a mother doing her best to help her son when he is in trouble.
And yet, in most jurisdictions, there are multiple government ethics
laws that prohibit this very conduct when the mother is a government
official. This is as good an example as there is of the fact that
government ethics is not about ethical conduct in general, but
rather about government fiduciaries dealing responsibly with their
conflicts of interest.<br>
<br>

Ethics reform can take the oddest forms, especially when those doing
it put on blinders and consider nothing but the situation before
them, thereby failing to consider best practices or, in fact, the
practices of any other jurisdiction.<br>
<br>
This is the kind of ethics reform that recently happened in Park
Ridge, IL, a suburb of Chicago with 37,000 inhabitants. According to

How much jurisdiction need a government ethics program have over
procurement matters when there is a procurement program dealing with
them? This question, common to all cities and counties, is being
asked in Honolulu, with respect to the Honolulu
Authority for Rapid Transportation (HART), which will be
soon awarding about a billion dollars in contracts.<br>
<br>

A conflict situation in my state of Connecticut is instructive
regarding a basic concept of government ethics, as well as a basic
concept of legislative immunity.<br>
<br>
Legislators insist that they require immunity because their motives
in making decisions cannot be questioned outside their body. Government ethics, on the
other hand, does not consider motive, only conduct and relationships. This is one of
the principal reasons why I argue that legislative immunity does not

Another day, another grand jury report recommending government
ethics reform. This report (attached; see below) comes from Orange
County, NY, a county northwest of New York City,
whose biggest town is Newburgh and whose most famous towns include
the very different Tuxedo and Kiryas Joel.<br>
<br>
The report criminally exonerates the county legislator who is its
subject, because he did a couple things right:  he sought ethics
advice from the ethics board, and he disclosed his employment with a

States can make life difficult for local government ethics programs.
For example, according to<a href="http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/sun-investigates/bs-md-sun-in…; target="”_blank”">
an article in the Baltimore <i>Sun</i> on Sunday</a>, in Maryland, local governments
have to use the same rules for access to ethics disclosures as the

Laura Hartman and Crina Archer's essay "<a href="http://works.bepress.com/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1038&context=laura…; target="”_blank”">False
Beliefs, Partial Truths: Personal Myths and Ethical Blind Spots</a>"
(January 2012) provides a valuable new view on how our blind
spots hamper our handling of ethical matters.<br>
<br>
<b>Double Blindness</b><br>

As we know, the devil's in the details. In government ethics codes, this means
the language. In the case I will look at here, the devil's in the
verbs.<br>
<br>
According to <a href="http://www.wtsp.com/story/news/investigations/2014/04/25/conflicts-of-i…; target="”_blank”">an
article on the WTSP-TV website last week</a>, a Florida state