We are hardly the first to observe that the genius of the U.S. Constitution lies in large measure in the adaptability of its guarantees to novel circumstances. Take, for example, the recent vindication of the First Amendment right of a bakery owner in Conway, N.H., to display at his store a mural — or sign — that was painted by high school students.

Conway is a tourist mecca in the White Mountains that is home to about 10,000 people. In 2022, Sean Young, owner of Leavitt’s Country Bakery in North Conway, erected on top of his store a display that is described in court documents this way: “The display shows a mountain landscape depicting baked goods, with a sun shining over them in multi-colored rays. The sun’s rays match — in shape, color, theme and ‘sunburst’ configuration — the bakery’s dormer, displayed directly below, which also includes the bakery’s logo: its name and a picture of a pie.”

A town zoning officer and later the town Zoning Board objected, determining that the display ran afoul of Conway’s zoning ordinance governing “wall signs,” which covers any representation that advertises, announces the purpose of, or identifies the purpose of any person or entity, or communicates “information of any kind to the public, whether commercial or noncommercial.” That is, just about everything. It imposes size, height and number restrictions on such signs.

Young argued that his display was a mural, not a sign. The town claimed that because it depicted products for sale within the bakery, it was a sign subject to size regulation. And at about 90 square feet, it is about four times bigger than the code allows.

However, Conway officials told Young that if the display had not depicted goods for sale within the store, it could have remained regardless of size. And when Young filed suit in 2023 on First Amendment grounds, that misinterpretation of the code was the town’s undoing. 

U.S. District Judge Joseph N. Laplante last month granted a permanent injunction barring the town from enforcing its ordinance against Leavitt’s bakery. Laplante ruled that the evidence showed that the town “has an intentional, albeit unwritten and uncodified, policy of enforcing its sign ordinance only” against commercial speech. That interpretation had no basis in the text of the code, he determined, and thus there was no reason to rule on whether the code itself was constitutional.

“The court rules only that Conway’s application of its sign code to the Leavitt’s sign in the particular manner it employed in this case, does not withstand any level of constitutional scrutiny,” Laplante wrote.

The First Amendment is usually thought of, quite rightly, as a bulwark protecting political speech from government censorship and repression. In that context, the Trump administration’s current attempt to punish individuals who express pro-Palestinian views constitutes a classic example of what the nation’s founders sought to guard against. By and large, judges have recognized that those views, especially because they are unpopular in official circles of government, qualify for protection under the First Amendment’s broad umbrella.

But it’s worth remembering that many more prosaic questions in American life that the founders could hardly have anticipated — such as the bakery sign case — are also resolved according to constitutional principles.

The current majority of the U.S. Supreme Court has tried to apply a historical straitjacket to the Constitution, holding that its scope extends only as far as what its provisions meant to people at the time they were adopted. One who understood the limitations of this approach was the late Justice David Souter, of New Hampshire, who brought to bear on his legal analysis an appreciation for judicial restraint and a flexible approach to constitutional interpretation. Circumstances such as the bakery sign demonstrate the necessity of that approach.