IT can happen to anyone. You want to give more than a businesslike handshake as a greeting, and a hug seems disconcertingly personal. You lean in to bestow the compromise ?a peck on the cheek ?and the person turns her head, and suddenly you're bumping noses or even brushing lips and teeth.

That's what happened to Margery Colloff, a Manhattan lawyer, when she was introduced to a more senior lawyer at a dinner party.

"I went for a peck on the right cheek, but he was zooming in from the left," she recalled. "And I literally crashed into his teeth."

The social kiss is unpredictable, agreed R. Couri Hay, the society editor at Hamptons magazine.

"I never kiss on the first meeting," he said, "but if someone offers a kiss, I feel I have to be polite and take it. Generally I really don't want to be covered in lipstick." The kiss "has been dumbed down," Mr. Hay said. "It is supposed to be a sign of affection, but I've seen people recoil when they see someone they don't even know coming in to lick their cheek."

Despite the awkwardness, the cheek, or social, kiss is displacing the handshake, once the customary greeting in American social and business circles. It may be a growing Latin influence, an aping of European manners, the influx of women in the workplace or just a breakdown of formality: no one seems to know. It's not just celebrities smacking the air or diplomats puckering up with the European style double kiss or Soprano family wannabees mimicking a sign of forced fealty.

Smooching one or both cheeks can be discombobulating in a society where the impersonal handshake or even the more distant nod is the most familiar greeting. Kiss protocol is so routinely bungled that it was parodied in a short video that the fashion designer Kenneth Cole used in February to unveil his autumn collection. The video shows how a young woman's efforts to bestow the affectation end in repeated disaster.

The awkwardness ?and inevitability ?of the social kiss has led to strategies to deal with it. "I position my face just slightly to the side," said Jeff Elsass, a Pilates instructor at the BioFitness Center in Manhattan, who is frequently greeted with kisses during his workday, "then I wait and see what the other person is going to do. That slight turn of the head can take you past the lip and the cheek."

If being bussed on the cheek is way too intimate, some advise that sticking your hand out firmly ?keeping a straight elbow ?is the best way to show yourself willing to shake hands and nothing more.

That's what Mr. Hay did at a nightclub opening in February, then added his own follow-through.

"A woman was coming in for the kiss, so I took a step back and then put my hand out in front of me," he said. "I turned left and kept going in one continuous movement, like a dance step, to escape."

While the handshake still holds sway in big corporations, said Barbara Pachter, who heads an etiquette-training firm in New Jersey, the kiss has migrated into areas like sales, where it can denote a warm relationship that encourages buying. Still, figuring out where the limits are can present problems, she noted.

"I had one pharmaceutical saleswoman client ?young and attractive ?who would kiss and hug her clients," Ms. Pachter said. "Then she saw one doctor at dinner and gave him a kiss and hug. His wife didn't appreciate that, and it was not appropriate."

The kiss is "happening more and more," agreed Peggy Post, a spokeswoman for the Emily Post Institute founded by the doyenne of etiquette. "We're much more informal in everything from the clothes we wear to how we greet people."

Ms. Post advocates the handshake and agrees that it's better "to steer clear of kissing people of the opposite sex, which can be misconstrued in some cases." This is especially true on first meetings. Later, kissing as a greeting depends on the relationship, she and others said.

At one time the handshake had to be initiated by a woman before the man would extend his hand, Ms. Post noted. That's long past since most women in the work force don't hesitate to extend their hand in greeting.

But the social kiss is often initiated by men who are higher ranking. For example, at a ceremony in January, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg planted a double kiss on Chief Judge Judith S. Kaye of New York State.

"The more powerful person is the one who determines the amount of physical space," said Ann E. Fuehrer, a professor of psychology and women's studies at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. "They are taking the initiative to determine the degree of proximity."

Sarah Felix, 27, a features editor at Good Housekeeping, remembered a cheek-and-lip collision with a former boss, which she found unsettling because, she said, "there is always a certain amount of tension in that gesture between an older man and a younger woman."

P. M. Forni, a professor at Johns Hopkins University, who wrote "Choosing Civility: The 25 Rules of Considerate Conduct" (St. Martin's, 2002), said, "You can use the kiss to overpower a person." But, Professor Forni said, "in an age when there are all these prohibitions on physical contact, such as putting an arm around someone's shoulder, we are looking for a way of physical contact that is beyond reproach."

He added: "The social kiss is a gentle reminder that we are physical beings. It is face-to-face encounters that make us human."

In Mediterranean countries, he said, "there is less of a stigma when it comes to touching," but American men are still tentative. While President Bush bestowed kisses on Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice and Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings when they were appointed to his cabinet, his public goodbye last week to Andrew H. Card Jr., his longtime chief of staff, consisted of very brief backslapping.

"Social kisses can be a nonverbal signal that you are embraced and respected," observed Pamela S. Eyring, the director of the Protocol School of Washington. "Still, they should be reserved for friends."

Some believe that cheek kissing simply codifies welcoming behavior. "Cheek kisses are customs of politeness, not more," said Polly Platt, the director of Cultural Crossings in Paris, a training service for corporate managers.

The double kiss is frequently used in the diplomatic world, which has adopted the two-cheek European version as a compromise between the kissier (three or four times) approach used by some Continentals and the tepid one-kiss welcome.

Donald B. Ensenat, the United States chief of protocol, said he greets women with the double kiss but men with a handshake, a pat on the back or an embrace, depending on their relationship.

"I'm from New Orleans," Mr. Ensenat said. "I was used to one kiss. It's a Southern thing to give a cheek peck, so it wasn't hard to get used to two kisses."

The social kiss may have roots going back to Roman times, some academics believe. Its popularity has waxed and waned. In the early decades of the 20th century, it was mostly seen among the aristocracy and spread gradually after World War II, gathering speed as the traditional handshake was deemed stodgy.

Even so, confusion often reigns because there is no set formula for social kissing. The French, for example, kiss on both cheeks ?one kiss each ?although in a few regions it is the double-double kiss with two on each cheek. The Belgians, the Dutch and even the dour Swiss go for the triple kiss. If you can't keep that straight and need a refresher, the lip balm company Blistex has a rundown of kissing customs on its website, www.blistex.com, under the heading Global Lip Customs.

In most countries the social kiss begins with the right cheek, probably because most people are right-handed and, according to a German study in 2003, most people tilt their heads to the right when heading for a lip kiss. So it follows that they would lean right for a cheek kiss.

National customs are reflected in the diplomatic world, but that does not mean it is easy to learn them, Madeleine K. Albright, the former secretary of state, wrote in her 2003 memoir, "Madam Secretary." While she typically got a single peck on the cheek from foreign ministers, she wrote, "in Latin America the maneuver was complicated by the fact that in some countries they kiss on the left and in some on the right."

She added, "I could never remember which, so there were a lot of bumped noses."

She took it in stride, but others who accidentally encounter noses, lips and cheeks less often find it more unsettling.

Ms. Colloff, for example, said that after knocking into the other lawyer, "I was so embarrassed that I pretended throughout dinner that it had not happened.

"And he, a perfect gentleman, did the same."

WASHINGTON, March 20 - A crime victim's emergency call to 911, when introduced in court, can provide powerful evidence of the attacker's identity and the circumstances of the crime.

Perhaps too powerful -or so most Supreme Court justices seemed to conclude during an argument Monday on whether the prosecution could use such evidence without violating defendants' constitutional rights to face their accusers in the courtroom.

The constitutional problem arises when the victim fails to appear in court and is therefore not available for cross-examination.

In domestic violence cases, the scenario is common; in one study cited to the Supreme Court, as many as 90 percent of victims of domestic violence fail to cooperate with the prosecution because of fear of or misplaced loyalty to their abusive partners.

Rather than abandon such cases, a growing number of states have begun to relax their evidentiary rules and permit juries to hear 911 tapes or read transcripts of police interviews with victims.

Two years ago, however, the Supreme Court issued an unmistakable warning that these efforts were likely to collide with the Sixth Amendment's Confrontation Clause, which guarantees to a criminal defendant the right "to be confronted with the witnesses against him."

In Crawford v. Washington, the court laid down a new rule: a "testimonial" statement made out of court cannot be used at trial unless the person who made the statement is available for cross-examination.

Now the question is whether the justices meant what they said, even in situations with strong policy arguments for bending the rules. Based on their responses in the courtroom on Monday, they did.

The Crawford case barred the admission of a woman's tape-recorded eyewitness account of a fight in which her husband stabbed another man. But the court stopped short of defining the various types of "testimonial" statements to which the newly empowered Confrontation Clause would now apply. Defense lawyers around the country soon began to argue that the decision should bar the admission of 911 calls and of statements given to police officers who respond to a crime scene.

Two cases were argued to the court on Monday, one of each type. Both have drawn wide attention from organizations concerned with domestic violence. In Davis v. Washington, No. 05-5224, the Washington Supreme Court rejected a defense argument that a 911 call from a woman who said her former boyfriend had violated a no-contact order and was beating her constituted a testimonial.

The incident took place, and the man, Adrian M. Davis, was convicted, before the Crawford decision. The victim, Michelle McCottry, was subpoenaed but failed to appear in court.

After the Crawford decision, Mr. Davis's lawyers argued on appeal that the admission of the 911 tape violated his right to confrontation, but the Washington Supreme Court said the call was not testimonial. It was, the court said, a request for "help to be rescued from peril."

In the second case, Hammon v. Indiana, No. 05-5705, the Indiana Supreme Court likewise upheld a conviction for domestic battery, ruling that a wife's statement to the police officer who arrived to investigate a report of a disturbance could be used as evidence against her husband, Herschel Hammon. The wife, Amy Hammon, failed to appear in court. Her statement to the investigating officer was not testimonial, the Indiana court ruled, because her "motivation was to convey basic facts" rather than provide evidence for later use at trial.

In the Supreme Court on Monday, Jeffrey L. Fisher, representing the defendant in the 911 case, said that during the call, Ms. McCottry "knowingly told a government agent associated with law enforcement that someone had committed a crime." That made the call clearly testimonial, as was "any accusatory statement to a law enforcement agent," he said.

Mr. Fisher, a Seattle lawyer who successfully argued the Crawford case, said the purpose of the Confrontation Clause was "to bring the accuser and accused face to face and require the accuser to deliver the accusation in court."

But the 911 call was "not just a call," Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg objected. It was also "a cry for help." Was it not a "practical reality," she asked Mr. Fisher, "that many women in this situation are scared to death?" She added, "Your neat legal categories don't conform to real lives."

Mr. Fisher responded carefully. "I don't mean to be insensitive," he said. He offered a solution: under a rule known as the "forfeiture doctrine," he observed, a defendant who intimidated a witness lost the right to object to the use of that witness's out-of-court statements.

Justice Antonin Scalia interjected: "Maybe we should just suspend the Confrontation Clause in spousal abuse cases."

The other justices undoubtedly took his point, a reminder that he was the author of the Crawford decision, and that he had persuaded six of his colleagues in that case, including Justice Ginsburg, that the Confrontation Clause should be interpreted literally.

As Justice Scalia made clear on Monday when the prosecution's turn came to argue, he was not about to advocate its suspension under these or any other circumstances.

When James M. Whisman, Seattle's senior deputy prosecuting attorney, described 911 calls as "powerful evidence" that should be regarded as constitutionally permissible, Justice Scalia responded, "You know, 'powerful' is part of the problem." He said that "the voice on the phone makes it an even more damaging violation if it is impermissible."

Mr. Whisman was joined on the state's side of the argument by Michael R. Dreeben, a deputy solicitor general, who said that a "panic-stricken call for help" had "unique probative value" and did not present the risk of government abuse that the framers had in mind when they added the Confrontation Clause to the Constitution. The risk was that the government could manipulate a witness behind closed doors, Mr. Whisman said.

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy asked whether a 911 call reporting that "he beat me two minutes ago and now he's running down the block" would qualify as a nontestimonial emergency report under Mr. Dreeben's analysis.

Yes, Mr. Dreeben replied, because the attacker might return and the caller still faced an "imminent threat."

Suppose, Justice Kennedy asked, that the call was "he's taken my diamond necklace and is running down the block."

"That would not be an emergency threat under our rule," Mr. Dreeben said.

The second argument, in the Indiana case, replicated the first in many respects, including an exchange between Justice Ginsburg and Richard D. Friedman, representing the defendant.

Mr. Friedman, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School who is an acknowledged expert on the Confrontation Clause, declared that "there is no domestic-violence exception for confrontation rights."

If the court made it clear that prosecutors could not use out-of-court statements, he said, states would have an incentive to protect victims of domestic violence and make them feel safe enough to testify.

"I don't know why that necessarily follows," Justice Ginsburg said. "It wasn't so long ago that police didn't bother with these cases."

Mr. Friedman responded, "I think we now recognize how serious a crime domestic violence is."

Tobacco Award Is Upheld

WASHINGTON, March 20 (AP) ?The Supreme Court refused Monday to consider tossing out a $50 million damage award to the family of a two-pack-a-day smoker who died of cancer.

Philip Morris USA, which controls about half the American cigarette market, had asked the justices to declare the award unconstitutionally excessive and to rule that the company should have been shielded from some of the smoker's claims. The court declined without comment.

The smoker, Richard Boeken, was 57 when he died in 2002, a year after a California jury found Philip Morris guilty of negligence, misrepresentation, fraud and selling a defective product.

The court also refused to consider an appeal from a former Arkansas governor who wanted to withdraw his 1998 guilty plea to tax conspiracy. It was the last remaining appeal in the Whitewater case.

The tax case involving the ex-governor, Jim Guy Tucker, arose during the investigation of Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham Clinton. An independent counsel spent more than six years investigating the business dealings of the Clintons. In all, 14 people were convicted. Mr. Tucker resigned in 1996 after pleading guilty.

In bringing an appeal to the Supreme Court, Mr. Tucker's lawyer, Jeffrey M. Rosenzweig, said that an appeals court had wrongly denied his client a new hearing on whether his plea was voluntary.

The justices did not comment in refusing to hear the appeal.

For the first time in a quarter-century, the Supreme Court will hear on Tuesday a case involving the basic question of what type of discoveries and inventions can be patented.

Both sides say the case, which involves a blood test for a vitamin deficiency, could have a wide-ranging impact on the development of diagnostics, perhaps threatening many of the underlying patents for genetic and other medical tests.

But the array of companies filing supporting briefs ?including American Express, Bear Stearns and I.B.M. ?indicates that intellectual property in other fields might also be affected.

Some patent specialists say they think the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case, against the advice of the United States solicitor general, to rein in patenting.

"The Supreme Court reached out and grabbed this case," said Edward R. Reines, a patent attorney at Weil, Gotshal & Manges who is not involved in the case. "These circumstances suggest that some members of the court believe there are too many patents in areas where there should be none."

At issue is whether relationships between a substance in the human body and a disease ?for example, the familiar association between high cholesterol and a higher risk of heart attacks ?can be the basis of a patent, or whether such relationships are unpatentable natural phenomena.

This case, LabCorp v. Metabolite Laboratories, stems from a 1990 patent awarded to scientists at the University of Colorado and Columbia University. They found that a high level in the blood of homocysteine, an amino acid, indicated a deficiency of either vitamin B12 or another B vitamin called folic acid.

Much of the patent describes a specific way to measure homocysteine, and those claims are not at issue. But the 13th claim of the patent is more general: it covers a way of determining vitamin deficiency by first testing blood or urine for homocysteine by any means and then correlating elevated levels with a vitamin deficiency.

The patent is owned by Competitive Technologies, a publicly traded patent management firm in Fairfield, Conn., and licensed to Metabolite Laboratories, a tiny company based at the University of Colorado. LabCorp, one of the biggest clinical testing companies in the nation, with 2005 revenues of $3.3 billion, sublicensed the test from Metabolite.

At first, LabCorp, whose full name is Laboratory Corporation of America Holdings, tested for homocysteine using the specific method described in the patent and paid royalties to Metabolite and Competitive Technologies. But in 1998 it switched to a newer and faster test developed by Abbott Laboratories.

Metabolite and Competitive sued, charging LabCorp with violating Claim 13 of the patent. In 2001 a federal jury in Denver ruled against LabCorp, and the company was eventually ordered to pay $7.8 million in damages and attorneys' fees. The appeals court that handles patent cases affirmed the lower court decision in 2004.

In asking the Supreme Court to overturn the lower court decisions, LabCorp is arguing that Claim 13, because it does not specify how testing is to be done, patents nothing more than the natural relationship between homocysteine and vitamin B deficiencies, blocking other inventors from developing better tests.

"The present-day implications of such a holding are limitless ?and dangerous," LabCorp wrote in its brief. "Anyone who discovers a new medical correlation could stifle medical treatment through a 'test plus correlate' claim."

But Metabolite and its allies argue that such correlations are the basis of diagnostics and that not allowing patents would stifle development of new tests. There are tests, for instance, that look at mutations in particular genes to predict a high risk of breast cancer or to predict which AIDS drugs will not work.

"Hundreds, if not thousands, of patents would at once be called into question" if the ruling goes against Metabolite, said a brief jointly submitted by Perlegen Sciences, a company developing genetic tests, and Mohr Davidow Ventures, a venture capital firm that backs diagnostics companies.

Another question in the case is whether doctors could infringe the patent merely by looking at a test result for homocysteine and then thinking about vitamin deficiency. Indeed, the lower courts said LabCorp had not directly infringed but rather had induced doctors to infringe by performing the correlation.

Partly with that in mind, the American Medical Association, the American Heart Association and AARP have submitted briefs in support of LabCorp, arguing, in the words of the heart association, that the patent could have "devastating effects on patient health care."

Millions of homocysteine tests are done each year because high levels of the amino acid are associated with an increased risk of heart attack, stroke, birth defects and other diseases; people often take B vitamins to lower homocysteine and reduce the risk. (Clinical trial results announced last week, however, suggested that taking B vitamins did not prevent heart attacks.)

Court precedents have held that laws of nature, natural phenomena and abstract ideas cannot be patented. "Einstein could not patent his celebrated law that E = mc2; nor could Newton have patented the law of gravity," the Supreme Court wrote in a 1980 decision. '

But in a 1981 decision in Diamond v. Diehr ?the last time the Supreme Court considered the issue ?the court upheld a patent on a method of curing rubber that made use of a well-known equation governing chemical reactions. The court said that the equation was only part of a broader invention.

Glenn K. Beaton, an attorney for Metabolite, said that as in that 1981 case, "it's not the correlation itself that is patented here," but rather "the use of that correlation to determine B12 and folate deficiencies."

In recent years, controversial patents have been granted on software and on business methods, such as ways of managing investment portfolios or of allowing people to order merchandise on Amazon.com with one click of a mouse.

Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and the Computer and Communications Industry Association filed briefs urging the court to use the LabCorp case to restrict such business method patents, or at least not expand them. Other companies, including American Express and I.B.M., say the LabCorp case is not relevant to business method patents.

The solicitor general, in urging the court not to hear the case, said there was not enough of a record from the lower courts on the question of patenting natural phenomena. That is because LabCorp did not raise that argument in the lower courts, instead trying to get the claim invalidated on other grounds. If LabCorp wins the case in a way that weakens patents on diagnostic tests, it could be one of the bigger losers. The company, based in Burlington, N.C., is counting on high-priced, patented genetic tests to fuel its growth.

Bradford T. Smith, executive vice president for corporate affairs at LabCorp, disputed that. "We think this case can be decided very narrowly," without undermining other patents, many of which rely on more than just correlations, he said.

After the faculty's coup d'etat at Harvard, I asked some contrarian academics if there was any way to wrest control of universities from the faculty. I started off with one possible reform: how about eliminating tenure for professors?

Forget it, most of the academics said, and not entirely because they liked that perk of their jobs. One of them pointed to a practical problem: "As long as the classics department has the right to choose the next generation of professors, you'd better give them tenure, because otherwise they'll never choose someone better than they are."

He wasn't arguing that professors are particularly petty, just that they work in a world with peculiar incentives. Authority is so diffuse that no one's accountable. Lawrence Summers was ostensibly in charge of Harvard, but he had little power to fire or hire anyone. The candidates are picked after a vote in each department. Summers could veto new hires and try to push departments in new directions ?but once the faculty got annoyed, he was out of a job.

If newspapers were run like this, by committees of tenured journalists unconcerned with circulation and ad revenue, we wouldn't spend much time trying to improve the weather map or the news summaries or movie listings. We'd all be too busy writing 27-part series to be submitted for peer review by the Pulitzer board.

After a while, as we hired more reporters like ourselves, we'd be surprised when outsiders complained. We'd be as genuinely puzzled as the Harvard professors who wrote to me after I mentioned an issue that arose under Summers: the complaint that the history department didn't offer a traditional survey course on the American Revolution and the writing of the Constitution.

The letter writers defended the history department as being more student-friendly than other departments, which may well be true. They noted, correctly, that there are courses in various departments and programs dealing with the American Revolution and the Constitution. But those are not the nuts-and-bolts survey courses traditionalists want.

Humanities survey courses are out of favor now, partly because they're too concerned with dead white males, and partly because professors can save time by teaching their own specialized work. The system rewards professors for not focusing on teaching. The incentive is to devote yourself to research ?at least until you get tenure, at which point even the research becomes optional.

One way to fix this would be to give university presidents the hiring and firing authority that most executives have. That way, they could insist on more attention to teaching. They could require tenured professors to keep doing productive research. They could hire a more intellectually and politically diverse faculty.

They could do all those things ?but would they? University presidents don't face the same market pressures as C.E.O.'s. If it's a school with a good reputation, the president can count on income from tuition, alumni gifts and the endowment. If it's a state school, the president can also count on public money.

Without outside pressure, the president's chief concern would be the same as it today: to avoid any unpleasant public battles with the faculty. As the incumbents with the most direct stake in the institution, they'd still be a power. Roger Meiners, the co-author of "Faulty Towers," a critique of academia, doesn't think that eliminating tenure would make much difference in how university administrators behaved.

"Any dean who would fire anyone would have a reputation as a nasty person and could never advance in academic administration," said Meiners, an economist at the University of Texas. "You get ahead by massaging the system as it is, not attempting so-called radical reform by dumping academic dolts."

In some cases, a brave board might stand by a reformer like Summers. But most academics I talked to ?the contrarians who supported Summers ?figure that giving university presidents more power would only make things worse.

"Abolishing tenure could just turn the decision making over to deans who come out of today's orthodox academic world," said Fred Siegel, a historian at Cooper Union. "That would mean that the few remaining non-leftists would get pushed out."

So is there any way to change academia? "The Achilles heel of academics is their status anxiety," Siegel said. "The only way to attack them is with mockery."