Business Associates

A former head of Chicago's public school system has said she will plead guilty
to a scheme to take hundreds of thousands of dollars, airfare,
meals, and baseball tickets in exchange for steering more than $23
million in no-bid contracts to her former employer, an educational
consulting and training company. The situation provides a valuable
look at the problems that can arise when someone goes through the
revolving door in the manner that is often overlooked by ethics
code:  from a company that seeks financial benefits from an

It all started with a private meeting among three members of the
Orlando-Orange County Expressway Authority board, according to <a href="http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/2014-05-20/news/os-batterson-xway-d…; target="”_blank”">an
article last week in the Orlando <i>Sentinel</i></a>. The subject
of the informal meeting was the ouster of the executive director, which took

<a href="http://www.cityethics.org/content/increased-ec-authority-and-access-ann…; target="”_blank”">Yesterday's
blog post</a> discussed the law giving California's Fair
Political Practices Commission (FPPC) authority over §1090
of the state code, which deals with contract-related conflicts of
interest and applies to both local and state officials. Knowing little about this section, which stands outside

It's nice when something you write about in a blog shows up on the
front page of the New York <i>Times</i> the following day. Yesterday, in a
post called "<a href="http://www.cityethics.org/content/privatization-and-transparency&quot; target="”_blank”">Privatization
and Transparency</a>," I discussed new types of privatization involving
nonprofits, which raise new sorts of problems. One type of nonprofit

One group of individuals with a great deal of power in local government
is not covered by local ethics codes or the other aspects of local
ethics programs. That group consists of officers of local political
parties.<br>
<br>
Sometimes a party chair is the most powerful individual in the city or
county, the individual who selects candidates and, if an elected official is disloyal, throws party support to another candidate in the next primary.
In other situations, the party chair is the mouthpiece for the mayor or

<a href="http://www.cityethics.org/content/do-ethics-commissions-have-jurisdicti…; target="”_blank”">Two days ago, I wrote</a> about a Louisiana lawyer-legislator who is arguing
that disclosure rules should not apply to lawyers, because the practice
of law is regulated by the state supreme court. The story behind an
indictment in New Jersey this week makes a strong argument for applying

Do <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_wall&quot; target="”_blank”">Chinese walls</a> (that is, mechanisms that separate someone from
information or involvement in a matter)
work in conflict situations in government? And what considerations determine whether they work or not?<br>
<br>
One consideration is whether, even with the Chinese wall, there is still an
appearance of a conflict. Another consideration is whether the

This month, in Portland, CT, home of the stone used to build New York City's
brownstones, the new ethics commission found that it was a violation of
the town's ethics code for the board of selectmen (the town's management board) to hire attorneys who had given campaign
contributions to the board of selectmen majority's party town committee,

<b>Update</b>: October 16, 2009 (see below)<br>
In his New York Times legal affairs <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/13/us/13bar.html?_r=2&ref=politics&quot; target="”_blank”">column</b>
</a>today, Adam Liptak focused on what is known as "honest services
fraud," which is actually part of a definition of "scheme or artifice to

When I heard about the ACORN sting, when two people posing as
pimp and prostitute asked for help in getting a loan to open a brothel,
I thought: what would happen if a local government official and a prostitute
visited a local government attorney to ask for help in giving the prostitute a
contract, so that the local government, rather than the
official, could pay for her services?<br>
<br>
One big difference is that it is not legal to open a brothel, but it