Sign law is actually a really well litigated and settled section of first amendment law. They can regulate, and regulate very strictly if they choose the physical embodiment of the display, size location that sort of thing. They lose they cases quickly and with extreme prejudice if they try to regulate content. Basically if the owner can show that other comparable works weren’t held to the same standards they are going to win. If I had to guess someone is going to be pulling the meeting records for previous mural reviews to find questions about content and the case is going to hinge on that.
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Freedom of speech is nothing if it doesn’t protect your right to express things that are in bad taste. If you were upset by your neighbor putting it up, the proper avenue is to take it up with him personally, and if that doesn’t work, mind your own business.
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The thing is, there is something to be said for not being able to decimate the lives of individuals because they work for corporations. LLCs really did and, for small business, still do serve a useful purpose so long as we have a capitalist economy. But as @gracchus points out, it’s been twisted to make large corporations super-citizens, most notably but not solely with the Roberts court ruling on Citizens United v. FEC, to the detriment of us all.
Also, Romney can go fuck himself on general principle.
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“free speech zones”…
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People often tout LLCs as “not having pass-through” in event of a lawsuit. As in, any actions against the entity don’t get passed through to the managers or owners. But anyone who has ever had an LLC and been involved in a lawsuit will tell you that doesn’t matter one bit because the plaintiff will just figure out who the managers and owners are and simply name them, too, in their complaint. So, pass through or not is really no protection in most cases and is just a formality.
It was said upthread, but the corporate structure here in the USA doesn’t place a heavy burden of responsibility on companies. Maybe it’s strongest in terms of taxation. And in certain industries, environmental and labor. But for the most part, there is nothing in terms of morality or anything remotely even resembling a social contract.
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This is a great example of the flaws inherent in any precedent system. Bad rulings can be built upon to create the illusion of legality. At one time, the practice of slavery and the diminishment of the humanity of certain groups of people were well litigated and settled. There was such a body of precedent for enslaving humans that we had to create an entirely new amendment to restrict the practice to prisoners in order to invalidate all that ridiculous precedent and litigation. My point being that precedent is not an indicator of legality or sound principal as any judge can be dead wrong in their ruling.
At some point some judge decided that your 1st amendment protections from government suppression of your speech do not apply to the written word if those words were written on a wall. Likely some local lawmaker didn’t care for certain types of expression, wrote some idiotic law, and the local judge agreed with that law and it snowballed from there. The problem of course is that our constitution prohibits the creation of such laws with the only reasonable exceptions being an extant public safety issues. That these laws exist and have been upheld by judges does not mean they are valid.
And if you’ve ever tripped over a poorly placed a frame sign or had to duck under a low hanging sign you might see that there are really good reasons to support restrictions on the physical form of signage.
Public hazard laws are sufficient to handle problems like signage being a danger as well as a plethora of other things that might cause you to trip or bump your head and they have the added bonus of not being based on questionable assumptions as to the power of government.
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