Las Vegas – The law that defines what strippers can and can’t do during lap dances in Las Vegas is unconstitutional, a judge ruled Friday.

District Court Judge Sally Loehrer affirmed a lower court ruling that as many as five misdemeanor criminal cases filed against strippers in Las Vegas should be dismissed because city code is too vague and unenforceable.

Loehrer said she believes the strip club industry needs to be regulated, but the law as written is flawed.

“I don’t think the law is clear enough,” Loehrer said, adding, “I don’t think it’s possible for the law enforcement to know what is allowable and what is not.”

The ruling is significant because no dancer in the city of Las Vegas can now be arrested for violating the municipal code that outlaws touching and caressing in strip clubs.

“As a practical matter, this should be the end of it,” attorney James Colin said of the municipal code used to regulate stripper conduct with customers. “It will affect every single dancer in the city unless and until the city amends the erotic dance code.”

But a chief deputy in the city attorney’s office, Ben Little, said the city is considering an appeal of Loehrer’s ruling.

Little said he believes the city code adequately defines what a stripper can and cannot do during a dance.

“Their job is to entertain,” Little told Loehrer Friday. “Their job is not to be prostitutes.”

Prostitution is illegal in Southern Nevada.

The question is a familiar one in Southern Nevada politics — how far is too far when a dancer jiggles for customers during a private dance?

During a pitched political battle in 2002, the County Commission determined dancers in the county have to be at least 21 years old to work in clubs that serve alcohol and are limited in the ways they can touch patrons during private lap dances. Dancers are prevented from grinding against a customer’s leg, and more intimate contact is against the law.

Problem is, the municipal code used to regulate lap dancing in the city of Las Vegas is not that specific. The law outlaws caressing and fondling, but it basically gets no more detailed than that.

“No attendant or server shall fondle or caress any patron and no patron shall fondle or caress any attendant or server,” the law reads.

A handful of strippers cited for inappropriate touching challenged their prosecutions in Municipal Court in recent months. Municipal Judge Betsy Kolkoski ruled at least five cases should be tossed because the ordinance was vague and unenforceable.

The issue was appealed to District Court, and on Friday, Loehrer spent several minutes trying to pin down city attorneys on when exactly a dancer violates the law and when she doesn’t. The law, Loehrer said, doesn’t specify what type of touching is illegal.

For example, it doesn’t specify whether a dancer has to use her hands to caress and touch. Loehrer said one could argue the law could be violated with a feather boa.

City attorneys said under guidelines of court rulings and the city code, the touching of strip club patrons by dancers is illegal when the dancers engage in contact aimed at sexually arousing the customer. Little said if a dancer used her hands, feet, buttocks or other parts of her body in a certain way to contact customers, that could be enforced as illegal.

But Colin said the lack of specificity in the law makes it impossible to enforce, and that Loehrer’s questions about what was legal during a lap dance and what wasn’t couldn’t be answered.

“It’s too confusing,” Colin said. “No one knows.”

The ruling would not appear to immediately impact the enforcement of law outside the city limits. The validity of county law would most likely have to be taken up in criminal cases for county dancers in order for it to be addressed, Colin said.

Allen Lichtenstein, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada, said the ruling is significant.

“When you have vague regulations, it means they are subject to interpretation,” Lichtenstein said. “That is where a lot of the problems come in.

“The public should care about any type of situation where there are vague laws and people are getting arrested without clear cut, defined rules,” the attorney said.