It seems like wtc911’s difficulty is that there is the law, and then there is how the law is actually applied.
These are not necessarily completely congruent.
A former law enforcement officer should probably understand this—there is a certain amount of discretion involved in law enforcement. Not everyone driving over the speed limit gets pulled over for speeding, for instance.
What you, SR, seem to be saying, is that the convention where ethics complaints aren’t brought against former office holders is kind of like the convention where law enforcement officers don’t generally pull someone over for speeding in many places around the country, as long as the speeder is driving no more than 5 mph over the limit.
It doesn’t conform exactly to the letter of the law, but it’s how it’s done in practice.
Is that what you’re trying to communicate?
Well, I started out in that place, sort of, though it is a bit more complex than that. But I have finally found the applicability language in the statute, in section AS 39.52.910, which spells out that the Ethics Act only applies to a state officer, not a former state officer, unless under a specific exemption (carve-out), such as the one in AS 39.52.250.
So now that means that for your speeding analogy, we stared out not being sure where the code said it, but every legal professional operating in the jurisdiction understood you had to be caught speeding while actually in the car and driving, and not after the fact, that while you might get the actual ticket later, your exposure for being caught speeding only lasted as long as you were actually driving, and was not something where the police could revisit a particular driving episode to dredge up new infractions years or decades later. It just made sense as good policy, and matched up nicely with the case law, where the only kind of case you can find is people being caught speeding while driving and not afterward.
Then I actually found the part of the code that says, yep, this only applies if you’re actually driving. Which explains all the better why the case law doesn’t have any examples of being caught speeding while walking on the sidewalk, though a reasonable mind could deduce that without the language of the statute. Because that’s just not how it works. And now we know why, both in terms of the language, and in terms of common sense.