Lead Stories

When the widow of British explorer and artist Herbert Ward gave the family collection of 2241 ethnographic objects, including 19 bronze sculptures of Congolese people, to the Smithsonian Institution in 1920, she included a requirement in the agreement that the collection be kept together and that the sculptures be displayed in a room or “reasonably conspicuous part” of the building open to the public “at all times.”

An alleged hate group may be rejected from the Amazon Smiles donation to charity program, the 11^th Circuit Court of Appeals has held.  The Court has affirmed the District Court decision holding that the Southern Poverty Law Center did not defame the group and that Amazon did not discriminate on the basis of religion.

After nearly a decade of litigation over whether states may require charities seeking to register to solicit charitable contributions to file a complete copy of their Form 990 tax information return, including an unredacted Schedule B containing the names of significant donors, the 6-3 conservative majority of the U.S. Supreme Court has held that the requirement violates the donors’ First Amendment right of association, a question that is “not even close” according to two of the Justices. 

The National Rifle Association, sued last summer by the Attorney General of New York seeking to dissolve the organization and recover large sums from top officials for breach of fiduciary duty, has failed in an effort to use bankruptcy as a vehicle to move the corporation to Texas.   A Bankruptcy Court in the Northern District of Texas has ruled that the case was not filed in good faith.

In a long-anticipated ruling, Fidelity Investments Charitable Gift Fund has been found not liable to the donors to a donor advised fund who claimed that they were damaged significantly when Fidelity sold all 1.9 million donated shares of a thinly-traded company in the last 2.5 hours of trading of the last day of trading in December 2017.  A magistrate judge in a Federal District Court in California has dismissed all of the donors’ claims.

The Bankruptcy Code provides that all pending or potential claims against the debtor are automatically stayed and may not be pursued when the debtor formally files for bankruptcy protection.  But the law also provides that cases are not stayed against non-debtors, including the individual officers of a bankrupt organization.