WASHINGTON -- The federal judge hearing Paula Corbin Jones' sexual harassment lawsuit against President Bill Clinton ruled Wednesday that a trial in the case must be postponed until Clinton leaves office but that pre-trial discovery -- including questioning of the president himself -- can go forward.


U.S. District Judge Susan Webber Wright in Little Rock, Arkansas, said the president "should not have to devote his time and effort to the defense of this case at trial while in office." But she rejected arguments by Clinton's lawyers that the case should be dismissed entirely.


"There would seem to be no reason why the discovery and deposition process could not proceed as to all persons including the president himself," she wrote in a 22-page opinion.


If allowed to stand, the ruling would mean that Clinton and other potential witnesses could be questioned about a wide array of issues related to the lawsuit, in which Jones accuses Clinton of lewdly propositioning her in a Little Rock hotel room in 1991, when he was governor and she was a state employee.


Clinton's lawyers said they planned to appeal the portion of the ruling permitting discovery to go forward, and it is likely that the unprecedented legal issue will not be resolved before the 1996 presidential election.


"We're pleased that Wright recognized that the president has immunity from trial while in office," said Clinton lawyer Carl Rauh. "This is an important victory for the office of the president. Our basic immunity claim has been upheld. As to the judge's ruling allowing discovery to go forward, we are concerned about this because it's a distraction from the president's duties and responsibilities of his office."


Jones's lawyers said they were "gratified" by the ruling even though it rejected their argument that the trial should not be put off. "The president was saying, 'We don't want anything to be done, we want to shut the whole case down, see ya later, call me in two years or six years,'" said attorney Joseph Cammarata. "We were saying this case should move forward and the court agreed with us."


In pretrial depositions, Cammarata noted, "you can ask about anything that will lead to the discovery of admissible evidence. We intend to examine all the troopers (who were assigned to Clinton's security detail) to look to see if there's a pattern of conduct here, to talk to other women, to inquire of President Clinton about such arrangement or such circumstances."


Whatever information Jones' lawyers discover could become publicly available -- and therefore an issue in the 1996 campaign -- unless the court orders that it be sealed. However, with the case likely to go to the federal appeals court and from there to the Supreme Court, legal experts said the argument over pretrial discovery could drag on until after the election.


Jones contends that then-Governor Clinton had an Arkansas state trooper, Danny Ferguson, approach her during a convention and ask her to meet Clinton in a hotel room. In the room, Jones alleges, Clinton made unwanted sexual overtures to her.


In deciding the question of whether Clinton was protected from being sued while in office, Wright relied on the Supreme Court's reasoning in a 1982 case, Nixon vs. Fitzgerald. In that case, the court ruled that presidents may never be sued -- in office or after leaving -- for their official acts. Wright said that the reasoning of that ruling extends to protecting presidents, while in office, from lawsuits that question their actions before taking office.


Georgetown University law professor Susan Low Bloch, who has argued in favor of presidential immunity from such lawsuits, called the ruling a "compromise" in which both sides won and lost. "Her decision that you can go ahead with pretrial depositions now is problematic for Clinton and doesn't follow the principle that made her say the trial should wait," Bloch said. "If it stood like this, I would assume Paula Jones would be quite happy because she can proceed pretty far along."