WASHINGTON -- Like at least four other members of the U.S. Supreme Court this morning, Justice John Paul Stevens seemed to be searching for how to define when a slew of campaign spending or other benefits results in an appearance of bias and requires a judge to step aside to ensure a fair trial.

The case argued before the Supreme Court involves a high-stakes election so riveting that novelist John Grisham used its underpinnings to shape the best selling book, The Appeal.

The case involves some $3 million spent by a West Virginia coal company executive to help elect a West Virginia Supreme Court justice who after taking the bench was the crucial vote in overturning a $50 million-plus verdict against the company. But the high court ruling could shape the future of state judicial races nationwide, including the often-expensive Ohio Supreme Court elections.

One indication of the importance of the outcome: among those filing friend-of-the-court briefs in an attempt to sway the justices were Ohio Supreme Court Justice Evelyn Lundberg Stratton and Ohio Citizen Action.

Stratton, who has reaped nearly $3 million in contributions in her three campaigns, says that appointed judges also can have their impartiality questioned and that people back judges on the basis of general philosophy, not in an attempt to buy their votes on specific cases.

But Ohio Citizen Action says that all that fundraising makes Stratton and other Ohio Supreme Court justices indebted to big contributors whose interests come before the court.

Stevens, three other liberal-leaning justices and Justice Anthony Kennedy, a conservative-leaning justice who is often a swing vote on the nine-member court, all seemed sympathetic to the latter argument.

"Our whole system is designed to ensure confidence in our judgments," Kennedy said

The problem might come, some justices indicated, in figuring out how to establish a system that wouldn't open up a floodgate of attempts to force judges to not hear various cases based on any number of reasons: from direct campaign contributions to the type of independent group spending heavily financed by the chief executive of Massey Coal in the West Virginia case to newspaper endorsements and labor union get-out-the-vote drives.

Justice Antonin Scalia and Chief Justice John Roberts heaped skepticism on the idea of saying that a party's constitutional due process right to a fair trial was violated by the mere appearance or probability of bias. Scalia said he does not favor a "constitutional rule on a sliding scale" where one set of potential conflicts led to another possible appearance of impropriety.

Roberts said he worried about parties to a case gaming the system by making "protective donations" simply to keep judges from hearing certain cases.

But Stevens seemed to speak for at least five of the justices when he said that the circumstances surrounding the West Virginia case were so extreme that it could lead someone to question whether a fair trial was possible. Stevens cited former Justice Potter Stewart's famous line about defining obscenity: "I know it when I see it."

That was the essence of the argument offered by the Theodore Olson, the attorney for Harman Mining Corp. and that company's president, Hugh Caperton.

The plaintiffs contend that West Virginia Supreme Court Justice Brent Benjamin should have agreed to take himself off the case -- an appeal of the huge verdict Harman won against Massey -- after defeating a sitting justice in a campaign where Massey executive Donald Blankenship's independent spending was a dominant portion of the campaign dollars spent on the race.

Those circumstances precluded Caperton and Harman from receiving a "fair trial in a fair tribunal," said Olson, a former federal solicitor general in the Bush administration.

But Andrew Frey, also a seasoned Supreme Court attorney, said nothing occurred that prevented Benjamin from making a fair decision, and he asked the high court justices arrayed before him this morning whether they thought themselves any different.

"Do you really think you'd be incapable of rendering an unbiased decision?" Frey said.