Just three days before the presidential inauguration, a federal appeals court panel on Tuesday ruled that allotting parts of the parade route to the official Presidential Inaugural Committee does not violate the free speech rights of protesters who want to use the same space to demonstrate.

A panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit rejected the notion that the regulation granting priority space to the inauguration committee amounted to viewpoint discrimination, instead asserting that it was “a reasonable time, place, and manner regulation of the use of a public forum.”