The US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit on Friday upheld a the dismissal of a lawsuit seeking the reinstallation of Confederate statues on the University of Texas Austin campus and a Confederate monument in a San Antonio city park.

The statues on campus had been installed in the 1930s, but following a 2017 demonstration in Charlottesville, Virginia, in which a counter-protestor was killed, UT Austin president Gregory Fenves decided to remove the statues and had them placed in storage. The next year the San Antonio city council passed an ordinance to remove a Confederate monument that had been erected in a city park in 1899. In both cases members of the Texas Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans sued to reverse the removals. The two suits were both dismissed in district court, and were consolidated upon appeal to the 5th Circuit.

The plaintiffs argued that because of their unique ties to the monuments and to the Confederacy, the monuments were expressions of their political views and their removal amounted to an infringement of their First Amendment rights. The court, however, rejected the notion that removal of these monuments caused a particularized injury to the plaintiffs, noting that they “confuse[d] having particular reasons for caring about these monuments with having a particularized injury.” The Sons of Confederate Veterans may have agreed with what they felt the monuments expressed, but that did not give them standing regarding the monuments’ removal. “The[ir] fundamental and fatal flaw,” the court concluded, was “they conflate[d] agreeing with speech with authoring speech.”