Public-university employees in Colorado remain eligible, for the moment, for Nobel Prizes and certain scholarships for their children. A state judge said this week that new ethics rules meant to prevent state officials from receiving gifts or favors shall not be enforced while opponents seek to have the rules declared unconstitutional, the Associated Press reports.

Colorado’s attorney general, John W. Suthers, had called the rules, mandated by voters as an amendment to the state’s Constitution, “absurd.” An analysis by his office found that the rules would bar future Nobel Prize-winning professors at public universities from accepting the prize money or similar monetary awards. The analysis also found that public employees’ children would be barred from receiving some college scholarships.

After a nonprofit foundation in Colorado that awards scholarships filed a lawsuit in February challenging Amendment 41, Mr. Suthers and Gov. Bill Ritter asked state workers not to panic, and said they were working “to clarify the meaning” of the amendment. —Jennifer Ruark