Nevada high court hears Las Vegas Sands judge-bias arguments

LAS VEGAS (AP) — One of the nation's most prominent lawyers told the Nevada Supreme Court on Tuesday that judges shouldn't make public statements about cases, and a Las Vegas judge handling a lawsuit involving casino mogul Sheldon Adelson should be forced to step aside for doing so.

An attorney for a fired former Macau casino executive countered that the judge did nothing wrong, and that Harvard University Professor Alan Dershowitz's argument amounted to a tactic by Adelson and his company, Las Vegas Sands Corp., to stall or scuttle a case that Adelson doesn't want a jury to hear.

The high court is being asked to overrule an administrative judge's decision that Gonzalez didn't exhibit bias by answering a Time magazine reporter's questions for a January story titled, "Meet the Judge at the Center of Sheldon Adelson's Strange Deal to Buy a Newspaper."

The magazine story emerged while the media learned that Adelson family members had bought the Las Vegas Review-Journal newspaper in December, and that reporters from the state's largest newspaper had been assigned weeks earlier to watch Gonzalez's work on the bench.