The myriad rationalizations offered by liberal feminist groups-which habitually canonize women alleging sexual harassment-for the disdain they have shown one Paula Corbin Jones is a bit reminiscent of the classic dog-bite defense: I don’t own a dog; my dog was out of town when the woman was bitten; it was his first bite; he bit her in self-defense; she asked for it; and she wasn’t really hurt.

The feminist line goes something like this: We don’t know this woman; she’s in bed with right-wingers; we already knew Bill was a womanizer, it was his first flashing; she probably came onto him; she asked for it; and she wasn’t really hurt.

There’s more: She waited too long (three years) before going public; we don’t believe her the way we believed Anita Hill (who waited 10 years); and her legal claims are so weak that they should be dismissed without ever getting to a jury, even assuming her allegations to be true.

I examined some of these points in "Her Case Against Clinton" (The American Lawyer; November 1996). Here I will examine the last one: the legalistic dodge, which seems increasingly in vogue.

The legalistic dodge misses the point that the most important public issue raised by the Jones case is not whether she could get past a motion for summary judgment, but what her evidence tells us about the character of the most powerful man in the world. And the dodge is, of course, advanced by many feminist groups and leaders who would argue the opposite if the accused were, say, Newt Gingrich.

These include ex-Rep. Patricia Schroeder, who suggested on CBS recently that Jones would have no claim "unless the governor or somebody had communicated to her she would lose her job, or she wouldn’t get her promotion, or there’s some job-connected consequence of her not having sex with the governor."

Leroy Hendricks is every parent’s nightmare: a 62-year-old pedophile, convicted five times of molesting at least 10 children over a period of 40 years, who admits that he might well molest more if given the opportunity.

His case, Kansas v. Hendricks, is every civil libertarian’s nightmare.

That’s because, to prevent Hendricks from preying on more children, the Supreme Court may be tempted down the slippery slope of allowing states to lock people up-perhaps for life-based-on inherently Speculative predictions of future dangerousness. Down that slope lie questions like this: If pedophiles can be preventively detained for what Kansas calls a "mental abnormality" predisposing them to molest children- even though the likelihood that they will do so falls well short of certainty-why can’t recidivistic armed robbers, or violent drunks, or others be detained for what might be called a "sociopathic personality disorder," which makes them equally or even more likely to commit other crimes?

At the bottom of the slope lies the specter of totalitarianism, as Justice Antonio Scalia noted during the Dec. 10 oral argument in the case.

Anyone with a grain of concern for civil liberties would hesitate to venture down this slope. But do die justices have a choice, short of telling Kansas that it must free Hendricks until-as Chief Justice William Rehnquist put it-"he goes out and does it again"?

Hendricks is one of thousands of sexual predators who will remain a threat to children as long as they live. Studies indicate that many have had dozens, even hundreds, of victims. Some are in prison, but few are serving life sentences.

A stunning irony, so far unnoticed, lurks in a pair of pending Supreme Court cases: Clinton v. Jones, in which the president and his Department of Justice seek to block a sexual harassment lawsuit against him until after he leaves office, and the lesser-known United States v. Lanier.

The irony is that the crude sexual advances of which Bill Clinton stands accused by Paula Corbin Jones would apparently be a federal crime under the Clinton Justice Department’s legal analysis in the case of David Lanier, who was a monstrously lecherous chancery court judge in rural western Tennessee.

Clinton’s alleged conduct would be even more clearly a federal crime under the analysis suggested in amicus briefs filed by leading feminist groups and scholars.

Another irony is that while the Lanier case has become (understandably) a cause celebre in the women’s movement-with every major feminist legal advocacy group in the nation urging reversal of an appeals court decision that threw out Lanier’s convictions-the president’s so-far-successful effort to slam the courthouse door in the face of Paula Jones until the year 2001 has prompted not a whimper of protest from any of them.

Given all this, the rumor in the Supreme Court press room-that the cases may be set for argument the same day, sometime in January-seems almost too delicious to be true.

(For a fuller discussion of the Jones-Clinton case, see "Her Case Against Clinton," in the November issue of The American Lawyer, which I wrote before becoming aware of the parallels presented by the Lanier case.)

Remember Graydon Snyder, the professor at Chicago Theological Seminary who got a sexual harassment reprimand for exploring the role of intent in sin by reciting a story from the Talmud about a man who falls off a roof, lands on a woman, and accidentally has intercourse with her?

Remember J. Donald Silva, the writing instructor at the University of New Hampshire who got a sexual harassment suspension for classroom use of sexual metaphors-like a famous belly dancer’s comparison of her craft to "Jell-O on a plate, with a vibrator under the plate"-that some female students found offensive? (Silva later won a judicial ruling that the suspension violated the First Amendment.)

Remember the student at Tufts University who was temporarily suspended for selling T-shirts inscribed with 15 reasons "Why Beer is Better than Women at Tufts"?

Such examples create a temptation in some quarters to dismiss reflexively claims of sexual harassment, and sex discrimination generally, as ideologically tinged whining over trifles by politically correct women whose actual agenda is censorship.

But now comes a timely reminder-from Normal, Ill.-of the real sexual harassment that stalks many women, especially blue-collar women breaking into traditionally male workplaces, who are often subjected to crude sexist vilification of a sort rarely experienced by pampered propagandists of PC paranoia who populate the professoriate.

Normal is home to the now infamous factory owned by Mitsubishi Motor Manufacturing of America Inc. The company was hit by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission on April 9 with the largest sexual harassment suit in history, alleging rampant harassment of as many as 500 women at the plant since it opened in 1988.