Lead Stories

The U.S. Supreme Court has extended the scope of the “ministerial exception” that prohibits courts from hearing claims of employment discrimination brought by teachers at religious schools.  It has reversed and remanded two separate cases from the 9^th Circuit, in which the Court of Appeals had reversed trial court summary judgments in favor of the schools and held that the teachers did not meet the criteria for being a “minister” previously established by the Court.

A state’s chief deputy Attorney General supervising the work of charities was properly allowed to testify as an expert witness in a criminal prosecution of a charity CEO accused of fraudulent misuse of organizational funds, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals has held.  It has affirmed the federal District Court’s opinion that the Attorney General’s testimony was limited to background topics, was relevant, and not unfairly prejudicial.

Two students who claimed that they lost out on college admission because of Rick Singer’s alleged payoffs to get students into colleges and universities as qualified student athletes have seen their cases thrown out by a federal District Court in California.  The Court said that they had not claimed a particularized individual injury and lacked standing to sue.

A member of a nonprofit corporation in Minnesota may not sue individually to complain about the suspension of her membership rights, an appellate court in Minnesota has ruled.  The Court has said that the state’s Nonprofit Corporation Act requires a minimum of 50 members or 10% of the members, whichever is less, to bring a suit seeking equitable remedies.

While national attention has been paid to the urgency of getting more women on for-profit boards to improve corporate governance, little notice has been paid to many of the largest nonprofits in the country – namely universities and hospitals – many of whose boards have failed to diversify.

A ground-breaking new national study published by Nonprofit Issues^® reveals some of the hurdles women face getting onto the boards of nonprofit educational and healthcare institutions (“eds” and “meds”) as well as the barriers they face to serving effectively on them.

An antique car museum in Maine that is a permissible beneficiary of a separate trust created by the museum’s founder to support antique car museums has standing to sue the trustees of the trust and reopen the litigation, even after the trustees have settled the claims with the state Attorney General.  The Supreme Judicial Court of Maine has reversed a trial court decision dismissing the claims.