The term Ombudsman comes from Scandinavia. It denotes the person in charge of helping citizens cut through government bureaucracy. The concept came to America in the 1960s via the writings of Walter Gellhorn, then a very distinguished professor of law at Columbia. (If it means anything to anybody, Gellhorn was the brother of Martha Gellhorn, who was in her prime a well-known journalist as well as one of the wives of Ernest Hemingway.) I know this because in the 1970s I served on a city charter revision commission that considered establishing one locally.
