By Barbie Nadeau 

Every so often, when Italy's Corte Suprema di Cassazione rules on an issue like whether a man's mistress who lies to police really commits perjury (the answer, "No"), you'll see this assemblage of notable jurists described as if their function were much the same as that of the justices on the United States Supreme Court who rule on constitutional issues.

Nope. In practice, if not in name, this is the supreme court of extenuating circumstances. The translation of "cassazione" is  "cassation," a little-used word in English that means abrogation or annulment by a higher authority. It comes from the same Latin root as "quash."  And unlike the American court of last resort, the Italian one takes a more, well, Latin view of legislation. Laws in Italy often are intended and almost always are received as a description of idealized conduct, not common practice.

In fact, much of the country's complex justice structure is set up to protect those who might be victims of circumstance, trapped by outdated laws still on the books that might have lost their relevance in the modern world. But the cassation court, which draws panels of five from a pool of 410 mostly elderly men and 10 middle aged women, has gotten so eccentric it may also have lost some of its relevance.

The justices do rule on serious matters like human rights, homicides and child abuse cases.  (In late February the court upheld the manslaughter convictions of five airport officials whose negligence led to Italy's worst air disaster, a crash that killed 118 people at Milan's Linate airport in 2001.)  But they also rule on trivial cases that tend to grab headlines for their sheer weirdness. 

Thus last week five justices agreed that a 48-year-old Tuscan woman known only as "Carla" should have her perjury conviction overturned. She had lied to police about loaning her cell phone to her amante. "The fact of having a lover is a circumstance which causes injury to a person's honor in a family and social context," the court wrote.  "Therefore bending the truth to conceal an extra-conjugal relationship was justified."

The most infamous of the court's rulings came in 1999, when it reversed a rape conviction with a decision that the victim must have consented to sex. The justices reasoned that she'd been wearing tight jeans, and "it is common knowledge that jeans cannot even be partly removed without the effective help of the person wearing them and that is impossible if the victim is struggling with all her might."

The macho sympathies of the court showed up as well in the reversal of a sexual harassment conviction. When a man kissed a woman working for him he was "just in love and acting gallant," not sexually harassing her, said the court.

But one of the strangest rulings came just last month when, for some obscure reason, the court decided the law is the law. It upheld the conviction of a 42-year-old man who was fined 200 euros for touching his genitals in public. Among Italian men, this is equivalent to finger-crossing, a way to ward off bad luck. Go to a soccer match in Italy, or watch a hearse roll by, then just look around. But the quirky court of cassation found this offensive. "Patting your genitals in the presence of other people is a manifestation of poor upbringing and education," the court ruled, even if, as it acknowledged, the practice is used "to repel evil."