When the City Council of a San Francisco suburb voted to consider what could be the most stringent tobacco regulation in America, anti-smoking activists cheered. Banning smoking everywhere but single-family detached homes and their yards would be a big step forward, even in health-conscious California.

Then the blogosphere erupted. Side-by-side portraits of Councilwoman Coralin Feierbach and Nazi SS chief Heinrich Himmler were posted on a smoking-rights website. Threats were e-mailed to City Hall, and police and prosecutors were called in to investigate.

A strict new ordinance is still set to be unveiled this winter for more public discussion and an eventual vote. But instead of just the flat-out ban on lighting up in apartments, condominiums and public places that captured worldwide attention, City Atty. Marc Zafferano said the first draft would be a menu of restrictions from which council members could pick and choose.

So although the bedroom community may not make the kind of history envisioned in the early headlines ("… to be first U.S. city to ban all smoking"), it still could make history of another sort, by finding a line this tobacco-averse nation is unwilling to cross — at least for the moment — in pursuit of better public health.

Even though nearly two-thirds of Americans have smoke-free policies in their own homes, according to the 2000 census, restrictions on smoking in multi-unit buildings, in the very sanctity of one’s own living room, constitute a new frontier in tobacco law.

But though the U.S. surgeon general declared last year that there is no safe level of exposure to secondhand smoke, acceptance may not be here quite yet. Just check out the Internet responses to the council’s unanimous pre-holiday vote directing the city attorney to draft the strict new ordinance.

The most important free speech case now before the California Supreme Court carries neither the heft of the Pentagon Papers nor the emotion of Nazis seeking to march in Skokie, Ill.

In fact, the figure at the center of the case, a Christian evangelist in Newport Beach, makes a highly unlikely 1st Amendment hero. Anne Lemen, 58, says she doesn’t care about free speech or the constitutional question that her case, like the Pentagon Papers before it, poses: When may government prevent speech before it has occurred?

Lemen just wants to tell people that she believes her nemesis, the Village Inn on Balboa Island, is mafia, as are her former husband and the guards at a local church, and the police are in cahoots. And, she wonders aloud, why would anyone accuse an innocent Christian woman of lying?

On top of that, Lemen contended, "the bar," as she calls the Village Inn, has tried to murder her.

Lemen owns a cottage only feet from the restaurant and led a campaign to restrict it because she said it disrupted the neighborhood. Aric Toll, 41, a chef who bought the restaurant and bar with his parents, filed a defamation lawsuit against Lemen, saying she was ruining his business.

After a trial, a judge ordered Lemen to stop videotaping Toll’s customers and barred her from telling anyone that the bar makes sex videos, dabbles in child pornography, distributes illegal drugs, encourages lesbian activities, has mafia links, is a whorehouse or sells tainted food — all false statements, the court said, that Lemen had made. She appealed the order before it could be enforced.

Courts around the country have disagreed over whether such "prior restraint" orders in defamation cases are constitutional, and cases involving them are multiplying as people sue to stop alleged defamation on the Internet. The U.S. Supreme Court has upheld prior restraint in cases of national security and obscenity, but not in a defamation complaint. When it took up the question in a case brought by the late attorney Johnnie Cochran against a picket, the high court said only that the order against the picket was unconstitutionally broad.

Duke University constitutional law professor Erwin Chemerinsky is paying his own way to California and working free of charge to tell the California Supreme Court today that the order violates Lemen’s right to free speech.

If Lemen loses, such court orders might become "a regular remedy in defamation cases," Chemerinsky said. Newspapers could even be barred from covering a person who won one, he said. In his view, the only appropriate remedy for defamation is monetary damages.

Balboa Island is a densely packed maze of mostly small but expensive homes, some of which are adjacent to stores and restaurants. The Newport Beach island’s reputation for rowdy nightlife has given way to a sedate atmosphere as rising home prices have turned vacation rentals into year-round homes.

The bar has been on Marine Avenue since the 1930s, and regulars reportedly have included James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart and Bing Crosby. Lemen’s dispute with Toll began when he and his family bought it in November 2000. Some neighbors, including Lemen, had also feuded with the previous owner.

Instead, the court declared the boy guilty of voluntary manslaughter and ordered that he be re-sentenced.

The ruling adds a new dimension to a case that rattled the community where the killing took place, and raised questions about the increasingly contentious nature of youth sports. Witnesses said that before the attack, the victim had taunted and bullied the boy about losing a game.

The ultimate impact of the appeals decision was unclear because the defendant, whose name is being withheld because of his age, was placed in the custody of state juvenile officials, who generally have the authority to keep offenders until age 25.

But when a judge warned that unfaithful spouses could technically be sentenced to life in prison, an obscure and seldom-used provision of the state’s criminal law became the subject of international scrutiny.

It’s unclear how serious Judge William Murphy of the Michigan Court of Appeals was when he pointed out the possible consequences of extramarital sex. Some observers say the liberal judge was making a political point by taking a strict interpretation of the law to an absurd conclusion.

Others have suggested Murphy was trying to embarrass Michigan Atty. Gen. Mike Cox, whose office triggered the ruling by appealing for a harsher sentence for a man who traded drugs for sex. In 2005, Cox acknowledged having an adulterous relationship.

Murphy’s adultery bombshell was a footnote in a November ruling on a drugs-for-sex case. But since a Detroit Free Press columnist wrote about the footnote last week, blogs and radio talk shows have debated the pros and cons of life sentences for cheating spouses.

The ruling came in the case of Lloyd Waltonen, 43, a man from Charlevoix in northern Michigan, who supplied a cocktail waitress with the prescription painkiller OxyContin in exchange for sex. Last year, Charlevoix Circuit Judge Richard M. Pajtas sentenced Waltonen to four to 20 years in prison, but dismissed four counts of firstdegree criminal sexual conduct, punishable by a life term, on the basis that the sex was consensual.

The state attorney general’s office successfully appealed Pajtas’ ruling, citing an obscure provision of Michigan’s criminal law, which states that a sexual act committed at the same time as a felony constitutes criminal sexual conduct.

An appellate panel found Waltonen guilty of criminal sexual conduct. He has asked the state Supreme Court to consider an appeal.

In the opinion, Murphy wrote that although legislators may have drafted the law conceiving of scenarios in which there was a violent felony involving forced sex, he was "curtailed by the language of the statute from reaching any other conclusion."

Murphy wrote that a person was technically guilty of firstdegree criminal sexual conduct any time he or she "engages in sexual penetration in an adulterous relationship."

He noted that state law defines first-degree criminal sexual conduct as sexual penetration involving another felony. Because adultery is a felony, he wrote, adulterous sex could result in life imprisonment.

Such a sentence is unlikely. No one in Michigan has been charged with adultery since 1971.

Sounding more like a first-time caller than a government official, Stimson told a radio interviewer last week that "when corporate CEOs see that those firms are representing the very terrorists who hit their bottom line back in 2001, those CEOs are going to make those law firms choose between representing terrorists or representing reputable firms." Not content to float the idea of a boycott, Stimson, a lawyer too, speculated darkly that although some attorneys representing detainees may be doing so as a public service, "others are receiving monies from who knows where, and I’d be curious to have them explain that." In an earlier period in U.S. history, that sort of hit-and-run insinuation was called McCarthyism.

Amid condemnation of Stimson’s remarks from the legal profession, a Pentagon spokesman said they "do not represent the views of the Department of Defense or the thinking of its leadership." For good measure, Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales said that "good lawyers representing the detainees is the best way to ensure that justice is done in these cases."

Many of the lawyers involved in detainee issues on a pro bono basis say they are motivated by loyalty to the Constitution, which, in their opinion, the administration has sometimes appeared eager to overlook. Advocacy on behalf of due process is generally a form of patriotism and public service. Criminal prosecutors aren’t usually in the business of tarnishing defense attorneys, for good reason, and it’s important that the government maintain the same professionalism when prosecuting the war on terror.