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Notes -
Vullo is interesting, but ultimately the court leaves qualified immunity on the table, the Second Circuit is almost certainly going to give her it, and almost any plausible future case will have some excuse for why it's just slightly different enough that they get qualified immunity too, and that makes it hard to care too much. The facts for the NRA to get here were very much outliers -- had Lockton been the slightest bit less NRA-friendly to start with, or James been the slightest bit more circumspect, and that balancing test becomes even harder to demonstrate.
It's better than the carte blanche for 'nice non-profit you have here, shame if something happened to it' the Second Circuit appeals court gave, and it's nice to see even Sotomayor willing to push back on lower courts doing this stuff, but it's more going to discourage overt acts at the margins over actually making anyone whole.
Jackson's argument is that the matter should have been handled as a retaliation case, rather than a censorship one. That's not quite a dissental, but it would be a much harsher standard to show in future or unrelated cases, and maybe even in future proceedings in this one would have made it easier to rebut.
Thanks! I could tell that Jackson's was a meaningful dispute, but I just wanted to be done, and so didn't work it out exactly.
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Standard pattern with this court: don't let horrible principles formally stand, but let the bad actors use them and lower courts accept them anyway.
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