February 8, 2023 — The New York Law Journal reports that Brewer client the National Rifle Association of America (NRA) is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to consider its suit against former New York Department of Financial Services Superintendent Maria Vullo, "whom the gun-rights advocacy group accused of threatening insurers because they did business with the NRA."
According to the NRA, Vullo and former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo engineered a 2018 “blacklisting campaign” against the NRA. The Association filed a lawsuit in May 2018, alleging the campaign was retaliation for the NRA’s viewpoint of speech. The State of New York filed a Motion to Dismiss, and, on November 6, 2018, U.S. District Judge Thomas J. McAvoy issued a highly-anticipated decision, which upheld the NRA’s First Amendment freedom-of-speech claims — the crux of its complaint. That decision was overturned by the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit on September 22, 2022.
The New York Law Journal notes that the petition for a writ of certiorari was signed by NRA's counsel, William Brewer III, and First Amendment scholar and law professor Eugene Volokh. Together, they argue that the Second Circuit’s opinion “gives state officials free rein to financially blacklist their political opponents—from gun-rights groups, to abortion-rights groups, to environmentalist groups, and beyond.”
“It also permits selective investigations and penalties targeting business arrangements with disfavored speakers, even where the regulator premises its hostility explicitly on an entity’s political speech and treats leniently, or exempts, identical transactions with customers who lack controversial views,” they wrote.
Brewer told the Journal that reversal of the Second Circuit’s ruling is “important not only to the NRA but all advocacy groups that rely upon the protections of the First Amendment.”