“We are happy,” said Ralph E. Main Jr., an attorney for the coalition, as he left the court after the five-hour hearing.

Otherwise he deferred comment to Charles Weber, one of the plaintiffs who has been serving as a spokesman, who said he did not expect the group would have any difficulty proving the statue of Lee is indeed a war memorial.

“I think it’s just a matter of getting the right words in there. We asserted in our pleadings that they are war memorials, but he said we needed to include facts,” Weber said.

The city had moved to dismiss the case, arguing that the state law protecting war memorials does not apply retroactively to statues erected in cities before 1998. In his ruling, Moore said he could not conclude that the legislature intended to leave certain memorials unprotected based on when they were built and whether they were located in a city or a county.

The Charlottesville ruling differs from an earlier opinion from a judge in Danville, who ruled that quirks in the law’s wording meant that it applies only to memorials erected after the General Assembly amended the law in 1998 to cover more conflicts and to specify that it applied to all localities, not just counties.