A New York man, John Swartz, was followed by police, arrested and charged with disorderly conduct in 2006 when, according to court filings, he saw police officers with a radar detector at an intersection and "expressed his displeasure ... by reaching his right arm outside the passenger side window and extending his middle finger over the car’s roof."

The charges against Swartz were dismissed on speedy trial grounds, but he then brought a damages claim against the police -- a claim that was tossed out in a lower Albany court when the judge sided with the police's account that they had followed the man believing his hand gesture to be some sort of distress signal. On Thursday, however, the appeals court ruled against this conclusion, noting "the nearly universal recognition that this gesture is an insult." (The ruling highlights the ancient history of the insult in its footnotes, pointing out that Aristophanes wrote of Strepsiades flipping off Aristotle).

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