Today, Honolulu Civil Beat features our piece on Nevada Comm’n on Ethics v. Carrigan, “Do Elected Officials With a Conflict of Interest Have a Right to Vote Anyway?“
We’ve written about the case recently in the Zoning & Planning Law Reporter (Supreme Court Preview: Voting as Speech When a Government Official Has a Conflict of Interest — “Analogy Gone Wild” Or First Amendment Right?, 34 Zon. & Plan. L. Rptr (Apr. 2011)), but the Civil Beat piece is less law-wonky:
In a perfect world, we wouldn’t need ethics laws to regulate the conduct of government officials. We could trust that by simply following their consciences, the personal morality of government officials would coincide with “doing the right thing” and we’d end up with a result everyone would agree was “ethical.”
But because we don’t live in a perfect world, an elected official’s view of what’s right, or moral, might differ from the views of her constituents and other officials, especially where the official’s objectivity might be questioned. Can she be trusted to make the “right” call when she – or a close friend or relative – can be said to have an interest in the matter she has a part in deciding?
In those situations, what is “ethical” may not be intuitive or lend itself to clear answers. Consequently, every state – Hawaii included – has adopted regulations restricting the conduct of government officials. Members of the Hawaii Legislature are subject to House and Senate rules that regulate their conduct when they may have a conflict of interest, and chapter 94 of the Hawaii Revised Statutes disqualifies elected and appointed state officers and employees from taking “official action” when they have a “substantial financial interest” in a matter.
In April, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in a case that could seriously undermine these ethics laws, all in the name of the First Amendment.
Read the complete piece here. If you are not a regular Civil Beat reader/subscriber, please consider it. Their pay-for-full-access model of journalism allows a more in-depth examination of a narrower range of issues than the daily paper (and their comments section is definitely less “uncivil” than those of other papers).
Stay tuned. The Court will issue the opinion by the end of the Term so we should not have long to wait. More, including the briefs of the parties and amici, on our resource page.