It’s the end of the year. The criminal justice system is slowing down a little bit for the holidays, but other activity is ramping up. For many parents, making a year-end gift to their children’s teachers is part of the holiday routine. Not so much in Alabama, though. This NPR story, headlined How Alabama Banned Holiday Gifts for Teachers, explains: Alabama's new ethics law, which took effect in March, bans nearly all gifts to government workers — not just elected officials, but all state, county and municipal employees. That includes schoolteachers, as a lengthy opinion from the state ethics commission makes clear. It is apparently the only such law in the nation to cover teachers. Those who violate it may be subject to fines of up to $6,000 and prison sentences of up to one year. There’s an exemption for items of “little intrinsic value,” which the ethics commission has said includes homemade cookies and coffee mugs of a “holiday nature.” (They’re right about holiday mugs but completely wrong about the value of homemade cookies, if you ask me.) The bottom line is that kids and their parents can’t give teachers Starbucks or Target gift cards, and at least some Alabama school administrators have emailed parents to warn them about the new rules. There are some potentially legitimate arguments for such a law, including avoiding favoritism or the perception of it. But overall, the law strikes me as a solution in search of a problem, and it led me to ponder [...]
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