Sue thy neighbor

CAMBRIDGE -- What does a high-powered Harvard Law School professor do when he gets in a dispute with a neighbor? He sues, of course -- even if that neighbor takes care of his young son after school every day.

Lucian Bebchuk is the much-quoted co-author of ''Pay Without Performance: The Unfulfilled Promise of Executive Compensation." Don't take my word for it, check out his website, where Bebchuk has posted what must be every (positive) word ever written about him or his book. In the book, Bebchuk and another law professor, Jesse Fried, offer their prescription for restoring corporate integrity and reining in runaway executive pay, good goals indeed.

But when Bebchuk is not lecturing America's corporate boardrooms on the need to do the right thing, he is busy suing his next-door neighbor, the nonprofit Agassiz Neighborhood Council. The object of his angst: the group's plan for a children's art studio next to his house.

The lawsuit in Middlesex Superior Court by Bebchuk and three other neighbors -- including a Harvard rabbi and a Harvard zoologist -- has held up plans for the art studio for more than a year and driven up the cost, says Terry DeLancey, executive director of the neighborhood council, which provides preschool and after-school care for about 100 kids, most of them at the Maria L. Baldwin School a few doors down. ''Silly us, we thought we were doing a service for the community," DeLancey said as she showed me a dilapidated carriage house she wants to expand into the art studio. ''And we still do."

Bebchuk and his fellow whiners say they are all for an arts center -- just not in their backyard. Said Bebchuk at a hearing three years ago: ''I come to express my position with some difficulty because I do think it's a great project for Cambridge. And if it were to be on Garfield Street maybe I would be here today speaking like some of the other people who wrote letters of support." Garfield is one street over from Bebchuk's neat gray-and-white Sacramento Street home, which Harvard was kind enough to sell him a few years back.

There are all the usual complaints: traffic, parking, noise. They complain that adults will be allowed to use the arts center when the kids aren't using it. Imagine that. Bebchuk was flabbergasted when I asked him about all this. ''Why don't you call our lawyers," he said. ''Why don't I send you some material where we describe in great detail how much our life is to be adversely affected by this." My favorite touch: A Harvard professor complaining in a lawsuit about a tiny arts center expanding ''institutional use" in his Cambridge neighborhood. It could have been worse, professor. It could have been a dorm.

It has been nearly two years since Cambridge issued a permit to build the arts center. DeLancey, the director, says her group went out of its way trying to accommodate the neighbors. Among those accommodations: agreeing to move the carriage house a few feet to spare a maple tree some neighbors wanted saved. Bebchuk, whose son Alon continues to come to the Agassiz center every day after kindergarten, and a few others couldn't be satisfied, she said. He is satisfied, however, with the care Alon gets at the Agassiz center. ''I would not keep my child there if I had not been pleased," Bebchuk said in a deposition.

One of Bebchuk's fellow plaintiffs, Andrew Berry, the Harvard zoologist, framed the issue in his own deposition better than I ever could: ''I shouldn't go on" -- always a tip-off in a deposition, by the way, that you should not -- ''but it's not a situation you want to be in . . . being the bastards who want to deprive the poor youth of Cambridge of their lovely new shiny arts center."

One can choose not to be, any time one chooses.

Steve Bailey is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at bailey@globe.com or at 617-929-2902.