November 1, 2026
I feel like social media and news outlets (understandably) don’t really dig “deep” into court cases. It’s something I’ve thought about for years and might delve more into someday. But I was reading the U.S. 10th Circuit Court of Appeals order issued on Friday in The Cozy Inn v. City of Salina, case (dealing with the mural/ad).
Couple of items to be aware of in case you want to read and I’ve taken snapshots of all 27-pages in the opinion.
First, this was an appeal to the 10th Circuit from the District Court and the District Court granted summary judgment in favor of Cozy Inn. That is a fancy way of saying “Cozy Inn won.” The 10th Circuit affirmed what the District Court found, which means they said “yep, the District Court was right.” That means, according to my reading, the only way Cozy Inn doesn’t get to finish the mural is IF the City of Salina appeals to the U.S. Supreme Court (who knows?) and SCOTUS finds that the 10th Circuit was wrong about its decision.
Second, what the District Court found and the 10th Circuit agreed with is that the City of Salina’s “sign code” violated the 1st Amendment and that the City of Salina exercised prior restraint when processing Cozy Inn’s application.
It’s an interesting case involving one of the state’s oldest and longest running restaurants and the city it has called home all of these years.
— TKG
