Last week, a federal judge told us what we already knew. Namely, that police in Ferguson, Mo. violated the rights of protesters demonstrating against the shooting death of Michael Brown. U.S. District Judge Catherine Perry struck down an ad hoc rule under which cops had said people could not stand still while peacefully protesting. Still, one's sense of righteous vindication is tempered by the fact that police felt free to try this absurd stratagem in the first place - and by the fact that this was hardly the only recent example of police using the Constitution for Kleenex. Ferguson, let us not forget, is also the town where reporters were tear gassed and jailed and photographers ordered to stop taking pictures. In our unthinking mania for laws to get tough on crime," we actually made it tougher on ourselves, altering the balance of power between people and police to the point where a cop can now take your legally-earned money off your sovereign person and there's little you can do about it. Indeed, at the height of the Ferguson protests, an L.A. cop named Sunil Dutta published in the Washington Post an Op-Ed advising that, "if you don't want to get shot, tased, pepper-sprayed, struck with a baton or thrown to the ground, just do what I tell you." Don't argue, he said, even if you "believe (or know)" your rights are being violated. Deal with it later. It's all well and good that now, several weeks after the fact, a court affirms the rights Ferguson police denied. But that's a poor consolation prize. An argument can be made that rights which aren't respected in the moment they are asserted are not really rights at all.