On January 2, 2023 the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit denied an Adams Outdoor challenge to the Madison, Wisconsin sign ordinance by citing the Supreme Court’s Reagan v Austin ruling.   Adams had argued that Madison’s sign code was unconstitutional because it treated off-premises signs less favorably than other signs by prohibiting digital billboards while permitting some on-premise electronic changeable message signs.

Here’s how the 7th Circuit Court explained the Supreme Court (“The Court”) ruling in Reagan v Austin:

The Court reiterated the long–standing principle in its case law that a speech regulation is considered content based only “if it “target[s] speech based on its communicative content…Applying this principle, the Court held that treating off-premises signs less favorably than other signs draws a regulatory line based location, not communicative content…

And here was the Seventh Circuit Court’s conclusion in Adams v Madison:

In sum, the legal foundation of this suit – that the on-/off-premises distinction in Madison’s sign code is a content-based classification triggering strict scrutiny – is unsound.  As City of Austin has now made clear, the on-/off-premises line is content neutral, so intermediate scrutiny applies..  And we see no flaw in the judge’s analysis and decision upholding the city’s ban on digital-image signs under that more lenient standard of review.

We’ll run a more detailed legal analysis by Richard Rothfelder in the future.

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