No matter how many law professors and ACLU lawyers and judges in funny robes dance on the head of a pin, there are some important legal cases that aren’t really about “law” at all.

There are Massachusetts cases that stagger up to the Supreme Judicial Court, not because there is an important legal principle to interpret, but because the politicians have been sucked into a quagmire of their own making — and can’t figure out how to escape. Oh, to be sure, there is often “law” in there somewhere, but the legal process is used to settle uncomfortable problems, quite aside from dainty issues of law.

A recent hideous beauty, originating from Lowell, required the justices to hold their noses and find a political solution. Law? The case could have, should have, been settled by politicians locked in a conference room.

The justices squashed a youth curfew law in Lowell that, at least in theory and occasionally in practice, could incarcerate kids for staying out late. The nation’s courts are full of such stuff, with every kind of jurisdiction from sophisticated metro to blue-collar shabby to urban nightmare attempting to pretty up the neighborhood by getting the scary kids indoors, where their sins are less likely to lower real estate values.

Some of the curfew ordinances hold up in court, but many of them get tossed, on a range of issues (“legal” issues, if you insist), ranging from hints of racial bias (the cops don’t often patrol the snobby parts of town, looking for valedictorians out on a late-night date), to the vague, imprecise exceptions that let some tots stay out late to howl at the moon.

The Massachusetts case pursued the punishment side of the equation, calling into question whether some 16-year-old could be sent off to the Department of Youth Services gulag for staying up late and prowling the mean streets of Lowell.

Justice Robert J. Cordy’s written opinion praised the virtues of “rehabilitating, not incarcerating,” the young curfew criminals. Of course, this sounds much more like a political opinion that a legal analysis — and that’s the very point of cases such as this one.

The civil side of the curfew law survived the appellate assault, offerings up a $50 fine and a stern note to Mom and Dad.

In Or Out

You can dress up the Lowell case in pretty constitutional language about freedom of movement and the like, but at the end of the day, politicians can say a little prayer of thanks that the real issues are lost to the distraction of the courtroom.

The political and cultural question that must be addressed in these curfew cases is whether our little munchkins out late at night are considered potential victims or potential felons. Obviously, the act of being out late is not firm evidence of felonious intent, but in some towns, in some neighborhoods, the inference is there, if never stated out loud.

One of the reasons some of the kids are out on the street is because the alternative inside offers drug-addicted moms and their crazy boyfriends. We prefer the kids inside because whatever goes on inside is less embarrassing to the adults extolling the virtues of “24-hour cities” full of conventioneers who don’t have a curfew.

Every case is not so profound, of course. In Idaho this year, the state Court of Appeals tossed a curfew violation of a young boy who was a passenger in a car stopped for a traffic violation. What if the kid was coming home from midnight church services, the court wondered. Praise the Lord and pass the legal brief.

These cases are in appellate courts because the political process has failed all involved. The Florida Supreme Court, in an ugly 4-3 decision, struck down local curfew ordinances, on the theory that kids with reasonable, innocent reasons to be out late, with parental permission, don’t deserve the criminal treatment.

The majority opinion addressed the right to privacy and freedom of movement. No mention of common sense, of politicians addressing what it is that scares us about certain kids out late — and why we don’t address it with public safety and social service initiatives more compelling than telling the kids to stay inside.