Lead Stories

The Superior Court of Pennsylvania, an intermediate appellate court, has affirmed a trial court decision and denied a request of the Virginia Military Institute to terminate a $2 million trust for its benefit and transfer the assets to its affiliated foundation outright.  In what it called a case of first impression, the Court upheld the position of the trustee bank and the state attorney general that the donor had intended to keep the assets separate from the institution and a difference in cost was not sufficient to deviate from that intent.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has affirmed a trial court decision dismissing a suit by the creator of a donor advised fund who sought reputational and other damages on the ground that the sponsor of the DAF paid excessive fees for managing the investments and deprived him of funds to distribute to other charities.  (See Nonprofit Issues^® Vol. XXXI No.

In 1850 noted Harvard University professor Louis Agassiz arranged to have four daguerreotypes made of Renty Taylor and Delia Taylor, who were enslaved on a plantation in South Carolina.  Renty was ordered to disrobe.  His daughter was striped to the waist.  Their images were used by Agassiz in an academic publication and various lectures “to support polygenism, a pseudoscientific racist theory for which Aggasiz, a prominent scientist, was a vocal proponent,” according to the highest court of Massachusetts.

A federal District Court in Texas has upheld an IRS denial of a $1.257 million charitable contribution deduction claim for a gift to a donor advised fund because, it said, the contemporary written acknowledgment of the gift did not say the money was held under the “exclusive legal control” of the recipient charity.  The Court said that the Contemporaneous Written Acknowledgment could not be combined with the gift agreement, which provided for ultimate authority and control of the assets, to meet the requirements of the Treasury regulations.

Should the federal criminal sentencing guideline be used to add an extra eight to ten months in prison for the executive director of a charity who embezzled about $150,000 from the agency when the guideline says a two-level enhancement should be applied when the offence involves “a misrepresentation that the defendant was acting on behalf of a charitable” organization?

A federal District Court in Illinois said it should be applied.  The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals has said not so fast.

The trial court that recently ruled that the New York Attorney General did not have grounds to force a judicial dissolution of the National Rifle Association (See Nonprofit Issues^®, Vol. XXXII, No. 2) has denied counterclaims by the NRA seeking to dismiss the entire case as unconstitutionally retaliatory or selective.  The Court has ruled that the AG may continue to pursue a variety of other claims against the organization and individual defendants.