PORTLAND (AP) — The plaintiffs in an unsuccessful lawsuit announced Tuesday they have appealed a federal judge’s ruling that Gov. Paul LePage was within his rights when he had a mural depicting the state’s labor history removed from a state office building.

The appeal was filed last week in the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston, according to lawyers for the plaintiffs.

The appeal argues that Judge John Woodcock erred in his March decision concluding that the labor mural was “government speech,” a doctrine that says the government is free to express itself, rather than the speech of the artist who created it. In his decision dismissing the lawsuit, Woodcock wrote that the state of Maine was engaged in government speech when it commissioned and displayed the mural, and was again engaged in government speech when it chose to remove the mural.