Law Commons^™

Raising The Bar: Reducing Conflicts Of Interest And Increasing Transparency In District Attorney Campaign Fundraising, Center For The Advancement Of Public Integrity

Center for the Advancement of Public Integrity (Inactive)

The Center for the Advancement of Public Integrity at Columbia Law School (CAPI) conducted a review of the campaign fundraising practices of Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance, Jr. at his request. Our review, as described in this report, encompassed research on relevant laws, regulations, and guidelines, as well as interviews with relevant stakeholders and subject matter experts, and culminates with recommended improvements to district attorney fundraising policies and procedures that are designed to address the problems of actual conflicts of interest, potential conflicts of interest that raise appearance issues, and unconscious bias, that may arise when campaign contributors also have …

An Honest Day's Work: Regulating State Lawmakers' Outside Income, Center For The Advancement Of Public Integrity

Center for the Advancement of Public Integrity (Inactive)

The practice of permitting legislators to earn outside income, income apart from compensation for service in office, is a frequent battlefield in the fight against legislative corruption in the United States. Critics of the practice argue that such income creates potential conflicts of interest, pitting legislators’ personal pecuniary interests against the public interest. As public servants, legislators should not be accountable to other paymasters and should not use their legislative positions to enrich themselves beyond their official salary. On the other hand, legislators point out that their positions are generally low-paid and part-time, and that they have the right—perhaps …

Fighting "Small Town" Corruption: How To Obtain Accountability, Oversight, And Transparency, Center For The Advancement Of Public Integrity

Center for the Advancement of Public Integrity (Inactive)

Small municipalities have been the subject of numerous corruption scandals. Bell, California and Crystal City, Texas are just two of many small cities to have made their way into the national spotlight after suffering at the hands of seriously corrupt leadership.1 While news headlines often focus on issues of corruption within state or federal governments, the effects of corruption within local municipalities is equally problematic. First, there are many thousands of small cities and towns in the United States, depending on one’s definition. And these governments receive and spend billions of dollars in public funds. For obvious reasons, however, small …

Chris Christie And Jerry Jones, Center For The Advancement Of Public Integrity

Center for the Advancement of Public Integrity (Inactive)

Christie is the Republican Governor of New Jersey. He previously served as the US Attorney for the District of New Jersey from 2002 to 2008. He is a likely contender in the 2016 presidential race.

Christie's penchant for accepting luxury perks, paid for by groups who arguably have significant interests in his decisions as Governor, was highlighted in a New York Times article on February 2, 2015. Questionable gifts include: travel on Sheldon Adelson's private plane, a 2012 trade mission partly funded by a group of businesses (Choose N.J.) barred from donating to the Governor directly by pay-to-play laws, and …

Conflicts In Property, Hanoch Dagan, Michael A. Heller

Faculty Scholarship

Property concerns conflicts – both conflicts between individuals and conflicts of interest. Conflicts between individuals have long been the paradigmatic property focus. According to this view, property debates circle around issues of autonomy and productive competition. But this is an impoverished view. In this Article, we shift attention to conflicts of interest. By helping people manage conflicts of interest, a well-governed property system balances interdependence with autonomy and productive cooperation with productive competition. We identify three mechanisms woven throughout property law that help manage conflicts of interest: (1) internalization of externalities; (2) democratization of management; and (3) de-escalation of transactions. …

Unconstitutional Police Searches And Collective Responsibility, Bernard E. Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

Then the police officer told the suspect, without just cause, "I bet you are hiding [drugs] under your balls. If you have drugs under your balls, I am going to fuck your balls up."

Jon Gould and Stephen Mastrofski document astonishingly high rates of unconstitutional police searches in their groundbreaking article, "Suspect Searches: Assessing Police Behavior Under the U.S. Constitution." By their conservative estimate, 30% of the 115 police searches they studied – searches that were conducted by officers in a department ranked in the top 20% nationwide, that were systematically observed by trained field observers, and that were coded …