OTTAWA — The legality of clubs which feature group sex and partner-swapping will be on the line Wednesday, when the Supreme Court of Canada rules on a pair of Quebec cases.

At issue are two Montreal cases which went in exact opposite directions at the provincial Court of Appeal.

In one case, James Kouri, who owned a club called Coeur a Corps, was originally convicted by a lower court on two counts of keeping a common bawdy house and fined a total of $7,500.

His club was a bar which catered to singles. It featured a dance floor, where every half hour a black curtain swung around to hide the area. People behind the screen took part in or watched sex acts.

In the other case, Jean-Paul Labaye ran a members-only club called L'Orage, which catered to "liberated couples." On the third floor of the club, behind one door marked private and a second door with a numeric keypad lock, members took part in sex acts, sometimes with others watching.

Labaye was also convicted of keeping a bawdy house and fined $2,500.

The similarities end there.

At the Court of Appeal, Kouri's conviction was overturned and Labaye's was upheld.

Because one justice dissented at each appeal, the cases went to the high court, which now is faced with reconciling diametrically opposed rulings.

Mariana Valverde, a law professor at the University of British Columbia who has followed the cases, said the matter had to end up at the Supreme Court.

"This isn't the kind of area of law that, I think, the Supreme Court has any interest in wandering into, but they pretty much had to hear the appeal because two panels of the Quebec Court of Appeal decided differently," said Valverde.

"The law in this area is very murky and the Supreme Court has not heard a case like this since I don't know when."

The cases revolve around what is a public place and what constitutes "indecency."

The trial judge in the Labaye case found the sex occurred in a public place, despite the members-only rule and the private doors.

In Kouri, the appeals court found there was some privacy for the sexual acts and noted no one was compelled to participate.

The Criminal Code defines a bawdy house as a place used or frequented for prostitution or "for the purpose of acts of indecency."

The definition of indecency revolves around community standards, what ordinary Canadians will tolerate.

"It's not at all clear how the community standards test is supposed to work," said Valverde.

The court produced a standard for obscenity back in 1992 and produced a ruling that cleared up previous confusion.

Valverde said it's time to do that for indecency as well and bring it into the 21st century.

"The lack of an objective standard has meant that of course we are going to get these contradictory decisions."

She wonders, though, whether the justices might try to wriggle out of a tricky situation.

"It's not an area of law that is going to ever make the judiciary look very good," she said. "There's always going to people who think it it's too permissive and people who think that judges are puritans, so I think it's a kind of a lose-lose situation for the judges."

That may push the court to avoid a clear decision.

'It might be possible for the court to avoid the whole thing, to avoid actually making a ruling if they really don't want to go there and to avoid taking the kind of position they took in the case of obscenity," she said.

"They could avoid it by basically saying that the two cases are not completely the same because one was more commercial than the other or something like that. It could be that they could avoid . . . really taking a position."

That would be too bad, she added.

"We really need some more rational and understandable ruling."