RAY SUAREZ: The other big decision from today involved the election of judges. It was a Minnesota case. What was being argued?

JAN CRAWFORD GREENBURG: This involved a judicial campaign speech and whether or not judges, like candidates for city council or, you know, the State Senate or any other political office should be able to express their views on issues of the day. Minnesota, like eight other states, has a code that prohibits judicial candidates from announcing their views on disputed legal or political issues. As the court found today, that strictly and severely restricts what they can say on a wide variety of topics.

A judicial candidate in Minnesota challenged that as a violation of his free speech rights under the First Amendment. And the Supreme Court, in a 5 to 4 ruling today written by Justice Scalia, said that he in fact did have a First Amendment right to be able to make these statements; that this code was unconstitutional because it targeted a core speech, core political speech, that's at the heart of our freedoms, and that violated the First Amendment.

RAY SUAREZ: And what did the dissenters have to say?

JAN CRAWFORD GREENBURG: This came down to a matter of free speech. We need to be able to allow judges to be able to say this, the majority said, and the dissenters led by Justice Ginsburg who summarized her dissent from the bench today quite passionately that this is about impartiality and the public's trust in the judicial system, that we cannot have and the states have an interest in limiting some of the things that judicial candidates can speak about because the public needs to know that the judiciary is impartial and unbiased. When they get a case, they're not going to already have their mind made up, they're not going to be biased. Justice Ginsburg in her dissent said, "I do not believe an election is an election, is an election." Judicial elections are different and the majority she said today ignored all of that.

Justice Stevens also wrote a separate dissent, articulating further on how he found the majority's reasoning so troublesome and suggesting it was just naive to think that the public confidence would not be undermined by today's ruling. Now, Justice O'Connor, who was with the majority, had a very interesting concurring opinion that she wrote. This wasn't an issue in the case, this opinion doesn't really have any sway in the lower courts, but she said, "look, if the states are so concerned about an impartial judiciary, they've brought all of this on themselves." She questioned the very wisdom of electing judges in the first place. It wasn't around at the time of the founders, in fact, the founders of the Constitution had serious concerns of electing judges. So they traced the origin of how we've come to elect judges; 38 states now elect their own judges to the state Supreme Courts, and she suggested that that's really... not really the way to go, that of course a judge who's up for re-election would be influenced by how the public, who might later have to vote on them at the ballot box, how they might view one of his rulings.

RAY SUAREZ: Well, how did the majority deal with just that issue, that idea that if someone's opinions on different laws in the state are well-known, you might choose them because you want that law overturned?

JAN CRAWFORD GREENBURG: Well, the court looked at that when it said, "we hear you in Minnesota, we know you're concerned about bias. We know you're concerned about open-mindedness, but this doesn't narrowly get at the bias problem. We're not talking about a bias in specific case." And judges may be talking about issues, and it's impossible for us to believe that courts can limit the speech of somebody who's campaigning, can limit their... the campaign speech on a core political issue. This is not about open- mindedness. We know that judges who are on the bench talk about their own views. This is only a campaign political core free speech issue.