Sotomay­or hands NRA vic­to­ry in Supreme Court free speech case

The Supreme Court unan­i­mous­ly hand­ed the Nation­al Rifle Asso­ci­a­tion a win Thurs­day in the gun rights group’s effort to revive a 2018 First Amend­ment law­suit accus­ing a New York offi­cial of caus­ing dam­age to the NRA’s rela­tion­ships with banks and insurers.Justice Sonia Sotomay­or wrote a unan­i­mous opin­ion that found the NRA “plau­si­bly alleged” that Maria Vul­lo, a for­mer super­in­ten­dent of New York‘s Depart­ment of Finan­cial Ser­vices, ille­gal­ly retal­i­at­ed against the pro-Sec­ond Amend­ment group after the Park­land, Flori­da, high school mass shoot­ing that left 17 peo­ple dead.

Supreme Court Jus­tice Sonia Sotomay­or speaks dur­ing a pri­vate ser­vice for retired Supreme Court Jus­tice San­dra Day O’Connor in the Great Hall of the Supreme Court in Wash­ing­ton, Mon­day, Dec. 18, 2023. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Mar­tin, Pool)

The ques­tion before the jus­tices was whether Vul­lo used her reg­u­la­to­ry pow­er to force state finan­cial insti­tu­tions to cut off ties with the NRA in vio­la­tion of con­sti­tu­tion­al First Amend­ment pro­tec­tions.
Vul­lo, who worked in for­mer Demo­c­ra­t­ic Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s admin­is­tra­tion, said her reg­u­la­tions tar­get­ed an insur­ance prod­uct that is ille­gal in New York, which is dubbed by crit­ics as “mu …