Democratic Gov. of Pennsylvania Josh Shapiro and his top staff received an all-expenses-paid trip to Arizona for the Super Bowl from Team Pennsylvania, a nonprofit that has garnered over $17.2 million in state contracts since 2007. The Shapiro administration claims the governor did not violate a gift ban he signed into effect in January. CERL’s Prof. Claire Finkelstein weighed in on the issue, telling Spotlight PA:

“If the Pennsylvania government is paying them to do studies, I think that counts as a financial relationship. Whatever the practices are at that organization, that doesn’t change the fact that it is truly a gift to the governor and that none of the exceptions to the gift ban appear to apply to it.”

Claire Finkelstein is Algernon Biddle Professor of Law and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania. She is founder and faculty director of the Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law (CERL), a non-partisan interdisciplinary institute affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center (APPC). She is a distinguished research fellow at APPC and a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI). Her current research addresses national security law and policy, democratic governance, and professional ethics. Read her bio here.