The Administrative Conference of the United States (ACUS) has commissioned Kathleen Clark, JD, professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis, to evaluate the extent of ethics restrictions on government contractor employees.
Clark
“The federal government has greatly expanded its use of contractors to perform services, and contractor employees now perform tasks that in the past had been performed by government employees,” says Clark, an expert on government ethics.
“While an extensive array of ethics statutes and regulations prohibit government employees from using their government positions to further a private interest, these government ethics standards generally do not apply to government contractors and their employees.”
An independent agency, ACUS functions as a government think tank and commissions legal experts to examine how federal agencies can improve operations. Clark’s research project is one of the first studies commissioned by ACUS’ new chairman, Paul Verkuil, JD, former dean of both Tulane University Law School and Cardozo School of Law.
Clark, a 2010–11 Israel Treiman Faculty Fellow at the WUSTL School of Law, teaches and writes about government ethics, national security law, legal ethics and whistleblowing.
An adviser to the American Law Institute’s Project on Principles of Government Ethics, she created and taught for 13 years a course on governmental ethics as part of the law school’s Congressional & Administrative Law Program in Washington, D.C.
She also has served as chair of the National Security Law Section of the Association of American Law Schools.
Among her ethics consulting work, Clark has:
- testified before the Canadian Oliphant Commission about U.S. ethics laws;
- evaluated Vietnam’s draft anti-corruption law for the United Nations Development Programme and Uzbekistan’s proposed code of lawyer conduct for the ABA’s Central & Eastern European Law Initiative (CEELI); and
- assisted in development of a Legal Profession Reform Index for CEELI.