Or rather, it has been affirmed again. There are at least two earlier cases in which federal courts made similar decisions.

In 2013, the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit decided against qualified immunity for a police officer who had arrested a teenage girl after she raised two middle fingers in front of him; the girl’s mother had been killed by the police a few years earlier. Also in 2013, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit decided that an officer should not have been granted qualified immunity after he arrested a man who had raised a middle finger while passing by in a car. The officer had followed the car and a verbal confrontation had ended in the man’s arrest.

These courtroom decisions do not necessarily mean that people can be rude to police officers with impunity, or that people would feel safe doing so, especially since police officers have used deadly force against unarmed people and avoided facing charges.

Joanna C. Schwartz, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and an expert on police misconduct litigation, noted that Ms. Cruise-Gulyas and a few others had their rights recognized only after they went through the trouble of bringing their cases to court.

“The right is there, but the enforcement of that right is a more complicated matter,” she said, noting that many people who experience police misconduct do not report it. “There is a gap between what the Constitution allows and requires, and how police behave on the street. And getting from the street to the courthouse is a long and expensive process.”

But Professor Schwartz added that the visibility of these individual cases might be a good thing.

“There is research showing that when courts clearly define what the Constitution allows or prohibits, then police departments are more likely to take those rules and incorporate them into their policies and trainings,” she said.

In the opinion last week, Judge Sutton drew a line between vulgarity and crime. “Fits of rudeness or lack of gratitude may violate the Golden Rule,” he wrote. “But that doesn’t make them illegal or for that matter punishable.”

A lawyer for Ms. Cruise-Gulyas did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Sunday, and a lawyer for Officer Minard declined to comment on pending litigation.