Legalised Corruption

Legalised Corruption
A case against Magistrate Ruben Galvan has exposed holes in state laws that some people say would allow a judge to demand or receive a bribe without committing a crime.An official from the NM attorney general's office has said that two statutes could let judges off the hook when it comes to bribery.
One of them exempts judges from being charged with bribery, and the other says a public official has to make good on their promise in order to be found guilty of the crime.
Whether New Mexico laws, which apparently allow judges to take bribes, are intentional or inadvertent is irrelevant.
The law is an instrument which people everywhere should be able to trust as ethical and reliable.
The problem is, governments make the law and can do so, at times, unconstrained by ethical considerations. Rather than protecting those of us subject to unethical or unfair law, partisan or ideology driven courts can exacerbate the injustice.
Debate on ethical law making is rare to nonexistent. The system depends greatly on testing law against basic instruments such as constitutions and statements of rights; or to higher authorities in some jurisdictions.
Seldom is there a guiding document setting out the ethical parameters of law making.

The central question is; can governments be trusted to make laws without having a strict ethical code to work within?
The answer, all too often it seems, is they cannot. The New Mexico example, serious as it is, is just one of a long chain of laws which, apparently, legalise corruption in various ways.
The law should not be a ‘political’ tool, but it is. It can be used, or misused, in this way because there are no real restraints in our systems to prevent it.
Maybe it is time to move the focus of anti corruption and consider the hows ands whats of ethical lawmaking frameworks.