United States Third Circuit

In a company's action challenging the Pittsburgh Zoning Board's rejection of its applications to change the "Identification Signs" on five Pittsburgh buildings, which included proposed building names such as "wehirenurses.com building" and "palegalhelp.com", a ruling in favor of the zoning board is affirmed where: 1) the First Amendment claim at issue is not controlled by Central Hudson, but instead should be evaluated under the test the circuit court delineated in Rappa; 2) under Rappa, the zoning board's application of its criteria constituted a permissible "context-sensitive" analysis; 3) plaintiff's equal protection claims fail as it is simply not similarly situated to the entities that it claims were treated differently.

Appellate Information

• Argued 01/25/2010
• Decided 07/20/2010
• Published 07/20/2010

Judges

• FUENTES, Circuit Judge

Court

• United States Third Circuit

Counsel

• For Appellant:
  
• Howard R. Lehman, Esq., Lawrence H. Baumiller, Esq.