Noah Lindell has posted this student comment on SSRN (forthcoming, Yale Law Journal).  Here is the abstract:

The Supreme Court’s decision in Williams-Yulee v. The Florida Bar watered down First Amendment strict scrutiny analysis for judicial elections. The Court’s trend toward ever-greater scrutiny of campaign finance laws came into conflict with a compelling need to regulate. This Comment argues that the Court should have avoided this outcome by folding campaign finance laws into the Burdick sliding-scale test used for other election regulations. The Burdick test requires courts to conduct a more tailored analysis of the actual harm caused by the law at issue, before determining the level of scrutiny to be applied. Laws like the judicial ethics canon at issue in Williams-Yulee, which do not create severe burdens on individuals’ rights, can therefore be upheld without applying––and thereby weakening––strict scrutiny analysis. But because the Burdick test is based on the need for state regulation of elections, it is only appropriate if one believes that campaign finance is part of the regulable election apparatus in the first place.