Where the case actually stands — and what we could not confirm

This matters more than the headline, so we are going to be precise about what is established and what is not.

Established from the judgment itself: the grounds, the decree, and the finding of covenant impairment, all quoted above from the judgment document.

From the plaintiff side's own chapter reporting, not from a court record: that judgment was entered 20 October 2025; that the State then filed a Motion to Amend the Judgment, still pending as of February 2026; and then, by spring 2026:

“The Attorney General has filed a Notice of Appeal; however, the appeal is limited solely to the issue of intervention and does not challenge the ruling regarding the prohibition on HOA chicken restrictions. As a result, the court's decision stands: the law prohibiting HOAs from adopting or enforcing restrictions on backyard chickens has been declared unconstitutional.”⁴

What we could not confirm, and are therefore not asserting: the docket entry date; how the Motion to Amend was decided; the date the notice of appeal was filed; which appellate court has it; its case number; its posture today; and whether any stay was entered. Missouri's judicial websites block automated access, and we did not obtain the docket. One further conflict is on the record: plaintiff's counsel is quoted elsewhere placing the ruling on 21 October rather than 20 October.

So the honest statement of the position is this. A trial court has invalidated the bill; no appellate court has spoken; the only account of the appeal's scope comes from the winning side's newsletter; and nobody has reported a stay.

The statute book still prints the chickens rule

We fetched section 442.404 from the Revisor of Statutes on the day of writing. Subsection 5 is published in full as current operative text, on a version marked effective 28 August 2024 with no end date. The history line reads, exactly:

“(L. 2018 H.B. 1887, A.L. 2022 H.B. 1662 merged with S.B. 745 merged with S.B. 820, A.L. 2024 H.B. 2062)”

There is no Revisor's note, no editor's note, no asterisk, no end date, and no reference anywhere on the page to the judgment, to Four Seasons Lakesites, or to the words unconstitutional, invalid or enjoined. The single case annotation printed under the section is the 2026 solar decision, which construes a different subsection.⁵

This is worth stating carefully, because it is easy to get wrong in both directions. The Revisor is not defying the court and is not asserting that the provision is enforceable. The Revisor codifies enacted session law; annotating trial-court constitutional rulings is not what that office does. The page makes no validity claim at all. But the practical consequence is real: a Missouri owner, board member or manager who looks up the law today reads an unqualified statutory command that a covenant cannot prohibit six chickens, with nothing on the page to suggest a court has invalidated the act that created it.

What this changes for a Missouri board

1. Do not treat this as a licence to enforce, and do not treat it as a licence to ignore. A circuit court judgment is not binding precedent on other circuits. It binds the parties. Its persuasive weight on the single-subject and clear-title grounds is real, and unrebutted by any appellate decision, but that is a different thing from settled law.
2. The procedural grounds are the durable part, and the impairment ground is the fragile part. Single subject, clear title and original purpose are attacks on how the bill was assembled; nothing in the Supreme Court's later solar decision touches them. The Contracts Clause finding is the one in tension with what the Supreme Court of Missouri said three months later in Eikmeier — that a statute making a class of covenant term unenforceable going forward is not an unconstitutional impairment, and that “a private contractual agreement could override any subsequent legislative determination… This cannot be so.” A board building a strategy on the impairment holding alone is building on the weaker half.
3. Document the covenant, not the argument. The association that won here won on a stipulated record showing a recorded restriction that predated the statute. Whatever an individual board decides to do, the recorded instrument and its recording date are the facts that carry.
4. Expect the question to come back through the legislature, not the courts. It already has, twice: Senator Mary Elizabeth Coleman pre-filed S.B. 1059 in 2026 — described by CAI Heartland as a new “Chicken Bill” that “appears to closely mirror the invalidated law” — and Representative Mike Costlow filed H.B. 2858 to widen the same provision to eight animals on a third of an acre. Both died.

Why the single-subject ruling is the story for every Missouri association

Strip out the chickens and what remains is a method. Missouri's constitution limits a bill to one subject, requires its title to be clear, and forbids a bill from wandering from its original purpose. Provisions affecting community associations in Missouri have a long history of arriving as riders on omnibus property bills — section 442.404 itself was built that way, through four different acts across three sessions, including a 2022 amendment that arrived via one House bill “merged with” two Senate bills.

A judgment holding that an omnibus vehicle can be struck down whole, taking its passengers with it, is a structural point about how association law gets made in this state. It is not a prediction about anyone's coop.

What to watch next

Three things, in order of consequence: whether any appellate court takes up the constitutional holdings rather than only the intervention question; whether the 2027 legislature re-enacts the chickens provision as a standalone bill immune to the single-subject attack; and whether the Revisor's page for section 442.404 ever acquires a note. As of today it has none.