Every so often, it's time to depart from the examination of some great (and, frequently, not so great) moments in the law to consider shorter excerpts that don't distill as well into a full story. Short takes on the law, you might call them. A sampling:

* From the State of New Jersey comes a 1944 decision of the Court of Chancery that would be ignored today were it not for a striking phrase that Judge Wilfred Jayne used to begin his opinion: "Mrs. Barber is the kind of wife who stands by her husband in all the troubles he would not have had if he had not married her." Mr. Barber, it turns out, had agreed to lease some land in a business deal, only to find out later that New Jersey law made his wife part-owner of the property. Once he discovered this he wanted to lease the property anyway, but Mrs. Barber said "no."

* Some cases feature judges who are really frustrated novelists. (And not always frustrated. One of the best of all crime novels, Anatomy of a Murder, was written by real-life Michigan Judge Robert Traver.) But the frustrated novelists usually shows themselves in opinions in criminal cases, since so many cases involve criminal law.

A 1982 case from the Idaho Court of Appeals, for example, written by a Judge Burnett, begins: "It was a shotgun blast in the early morning that killed Merardo Rodriquez." Well, everyone knows how much it hurts to get shot there.

Several months later, Burnett began another opinion, "The Fenley house in Boise was quiet. The body of Dorothy Fenley remained in a chair where she had been sitting when a shotgun blast struck her." (No question about it, either shotgun murders are a serious problem in Idaho or Burnett has a very strange fixation.)

* Idaho may be the shotgun-murder capital, but in 1985, the Arizona Court of Appeals considered the somewhat different case of Catherine Wagenseller, a nurse fired from a Scottsdale hospital for (so she said) refusing to participate in a skit that involved a parody of the song "Moon River," ending with the performers "mooning" the audience.

Wagenseller claimed that she could not be fired for refusing to commit what arguably constituted indecent exposure. The appeals court agreed, stating that being fired for that reason violated Arizona law "even if, for instance, the employer might have grounds to believe that all of the onlookers were voyeurs and would not be offended." Nothing like sound legal reasoning to underscore the court's point.

Just to show, though, that they were regular guys, the court added a footnote: "We have little expertise in the techniques of mooning. We cannot say as a matter of law, therefore, whether mooning would always violate the [indecent exposure] statute. . . . That question could only be determined by an examination of the facts of each case. We deem such an inquiry unseemly and unnecessary in a civil case." Everyone knows, of course, that criminal cases are allowed to be much racier.

* A 1963 decision of the U.S. Supreme Court is remarkable for an entirely different reason. It has a misprint that wasn't caught presumably because the sentence makes even more sense with the mistake. In an obscenity case, the court's words of wisdom were rendered: "The procedures of the Commission are radically deficient. They fall far short of the constitutional requirements of governmental regulation of obscurity." Indeed, that's a field government is uniquely qualified to regulate.

* Finally, under the heading of "Someone Out There is Listening!," in a 1987 decision, Justice Richard Sims of the court of appeal in Sacramento, California offered a zoological analogy. In an otherwise incomprehensible case involving a real estate dispute and an eviction, Sims explained that a trustee under a deed of trust is not the kind of trustee described elsewhere in the law; or, "Just as a panda bear is not a true bear, a trustee of a deed of trust is not a true trustee."

In a helpful footnote, he added: "The panda is closely related to the raccoon. With luck, this passage will end up as the following headnote in some legal digest: 'Trustee under deed of trust held to be panda bear.'"

And it did. The first version of the case, published in a paperback edition before all those nice hardback books that eventually line the law library shelves, had a headnote for this part of the case included Sims' analogy almost verbatim.