Lead Stories

When does a civil court have jurisdiction to resolve an internal church dispute?

The facile answer is that courts have jurisdiction in cases that can be decided on “neutral principles of law” and do not have jurisdiction in cases that would entangle the court in ecclesiastical matters involving religious doctrine.  The trick, of course, is deciding where the line should be drawn.

Four state appellate courts have recently been forced to draw the line in separate cases.  In two cases, the courts accepted jurisdiction and in two they did not.  But two of the appellate decisions reversed contrary decisions of a trial court.

Is a 16-year-old who is asked by a nonprofit agency to drive some other participants home from a youth event when the agency had trouble fitting all of the participants into its vans considered a “volunteer” for the agency?

The issue was important because the driver was involved in an accident and his four passengers were killed. When the agency was sued, the insurance carrier claimed that the incident was excluded because accidents involving vehicles driven by “any insured” were not covered and it said the driver was an insured “volunteer.”

Not all securities frauds are Ponzi schemes, said the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.  And it makes a difference.  About $240,000 for the American Cancer Society in this case.

Clemson University has been awarded both a $100,000 bequest and a $100,000 retirement account beneficiary designation on the death of a donor seeking to endow a scholarship fund.  The Court of Appeals of South Carolina has affirmed a trial court decision denying a claim by the donor’s estate that she intended to make only a single $100,000 gift. (Estate of Gill v. Clemson University Foundation, Ct. of App. S.C., No. 4951, 3/7/12.)

A 4-3 decision of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court has rejected help from the state Legislature in defining the constitutional contours of an “institution of purely public charity” eligible for state real estate tax exemption and opened the way for local taxing authorities to challenge existing exemptions to generate more local revenue.  (Mesivtah Eitz Chaim of Bobov v. Pike County Board of Assessment Appeals, No. 16 MAP 2011, 4/25/12.)

Less than a week after the decision, a representative of the Philadelphia City Solicitor’s office suggested that tax-exempt hospitals and universities come to talk about payments in lieu of taxes in order to prevent challenges to their status, echoing the state-wide efforts of local governments to exploit uncertainty about the definition of charity to obtain PILOTS in the 1990s.

The volunteer board chair of a nonprofit drug and alcohol treatment program who made start-up and bridge loans to the organization and paid $193,000 in unpaid withholding taxes has lost a suit to recover the funds he personally advanced to pay the taxes.  A federal District Court in Tennessee has held that he was a “responsible person” and personally liable to pay the taxes the organization failed to pay itself.  (Bunch v. Commissioner, E.D. TN, No. 2:10-CV-122, 3/8/12.)