There's a First Amendment right to be rude to a cop (If You Are A Black Harvard Professor named Henry Louis Gates)
he now-infamous Gates story has gone through the familiar media spin-cycle: incident, reaction, response,
so on and so forth. Drowned out of this echo chamber has been an
all-too-important (and legally controlling) aspect: the imbroglio
between Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Cambridge Police
Sgt. James Crowley has more to do with the limits (or breadth) of the
First Amendment than with race and social class.
The issue is not how nasty the discourse between the two might have been, but whether what Professor Gates said—assuming, for argument's sake, the officer's version of events as fact—could by any stretch of both law and imagination constitute a ground for arrest for "disorderly conduct" (the charge leveled) or any other crime. Whether those same words could be censored on a college campus is a somewhat different—though related—question.
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