I had the same problem and since my sortable items contained three or four clickable items (and the number was variable) binding/unbinding them on the fly didn’t really seem an option. However, by incident I specified the
helper : 'clone'
option, which behaved identically to the original sortable in terms of interface but apparently does not fire click events on the dragged item and thus solves the problem. It’s as much a hack as anything else, but at least it’s short and easy..