The U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments yesterday in a Nevada case which challenges a state ethics law as a violation of the First Amendment rights of an elected official. How worried should we be? It isn’t clear yet.

The case, Ethics v Carrigan, involves a city council member who voted in favor of a casino developer represented by his friend and campaign manager. The Nevada Ethics Commission cited him for violating the state’s conflict of interest law, but the Nevada Supreme Court later ruled that the vote was protected as free speech.

ScotusBlog has links to all of the documents in the case, including a brief filed on behalf of several states, including Hawaii.

The states’ legal argument concludes:

In short, respect for state governments is lost where laws regulating voting conflicts of public officials must first run the litigation gauntlet of strict scrutiny; recusal provisions will be presumptively unconstitutional, permitting public corruption to survive and public confidence to further erode.

Several news organizations, led by the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, and including AP, the Newpaper Guild, and others, also weighed in supporting the ethics law. They predicted that a wide range of other public interest laws and restrictions would be undermined if the court allowed the Nevada decision to stand.

The transcript of yesterday’s arguments before the Supreme Court is already available. The Cornell University Law School provided an interesting overview of the case

NPR had a long report on yesterday’s session, as did the Las Vegas Review Journal.