A sampling of Belfer Center fellows and affiliates in the news.

We seek to define and give content to four ethical responsibilities that we believe are of signal importance to lawyers in their fundamental roles as expert technicians, wise counselors, and effective leaders: responsibilities to their clients and stakeholders; responsibilities to the legal system; responsibilities to their institutions; and responsibilities to society at large.

The role of General Motors Co. general counsel Michael Millikin in the deadly ignition-switch events should be a subject of intense interest and close scrutiny for lawyers working in, or for, complex corporations. But the recent—and I think overly simplistic— comments of prominent attorney John Quinn detract and do not add to a practical discussion about the responsibilities of general counsel.

The report by Anton Valukas on the unconscionable multiyear delay by General Motors Co. in addressing safety issues caused by a malfunctioning ignition switch, focuses on the culpability of individuals in the past, including engineers, investigators and lawyers in the vast GM bureaucracy. What is missing, strikingly missing, is the failure of GM leaders—past CEOs and senior GM officers, including the current general counsel—to create a safety culture that would have immediately surfaced and addressed the particular switch issue and, more importantly, their failure to long ago and on their own initiative take the myriad safety culture, system and process steps which Valukas recommends today.

As media observers explore every angle of Jill Abramson’s unceremonious sacking from the New York Times, one key Management 101 question is whether she was given a fair chance to address the management issues that, according to Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr, led him to dismiss her.

Walmart’s bribery scandal, and the sweep of the current investigation, have made this case a poster-child for the snares of corruption facing global companies, putting it in the same category as the towering bribery scandal faced several years ago by Siemens. Many boards and CEOs from around the globe cite corruption as one of the top issues they face in current globalization efforts — in this sense, “the whole world is watching” the Walmart case carefully.

Corporations should go far beyond the frameworks in Dodd-Frank and Sarbanes-Oxley in designing clawback and holdback policies, writes Senior Fellow Ben Heineman. Broadly and properly constructed, these mechanisms, now encompassed under the term of art “compensation recovery policies” are essential for ensuring high performance with high integrity.

Now that military strongman Abdel Fattah al-Sisi has declared his intention to run for Egypt’s presidency, he should keep something in mind: Both Hosni Mubarak and his successor, Mohammed Morsi, weren’t only ousted from the country’s highest office because they suppressed political and constitutional rights, writes Ben Heineman. They also fell because fitful economic reforms failed to address poverty and near-poverty, high unemployment, extremely high youth unemployment, and unchecked inflation.

The JP Morgan Chase board of directors has vexed the world with its terse announcement in a recent 8-K filing that CEO Jamie Dimon would receive a big pay raise — $20 million in total pay for 2013, up from $11.5 million for 2012, a 74 percent increase.

According to former GE general counsel Ben Heineman Jr., there are six essential governance tasks for boards and business leaders to restore trust in corporations by fusing high performance with high integrity.