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The Minnesota Supreme Court adopted a canon of judicial conduct that prohibited a candidate for a judicial office from “announcing his or her views on disputed legal or political issues. Some candidates challenged the law as violating the First Amendment. The Supreme Court agreed. The law both prohibited speech based on its content and burdens a category of speech that is at the core of First Amendment freedoms–speech about the qualifications of candidates for public office. The proper test to be applied to determine the constitutionality of such a restriction is strict scrutiny, under which respondents have the burden to prove that the clause is (1) narrowly tailored, to serve (2) a compelling state interest. A lower court had found that there were two interests as sufficiently compelling to justify the law: preserving the state judiciary’s impartiality and preserving the appearance of that impartiality. The Court found that the law failed these tests. First, the clause was not narrowly tailored to serve impartiality (or its appearance) in the traditional sense of the word, as a lack of bias for or against either party to the proceeding. Indeed, the clause was barely tailored to serve that interest at all, inasmuch as it did not restrict speech for or against particular parties, but rather speech for or against particular issues. Second, although “impartiality” in the sense of a lack of preconception in favor of or against a particular legal view may well be an interest served by the law, pursuing this objective is not a compelling state interest, since it is virtually impossible, and hardly desirable, to find a judge who does not have preconceptions about the law. Third, those challenging the law did not overcome the burden imposed by strict scrutiny of establishing that statements made during an election campaign are uniquely destructive of openmindedness.
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