Reversing a decision by a state appellate court, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court has held that a lawyer cannot be liable for legal malpractice to potential third-party beneficiaries of a decedent’s estate when the potential beneficiaries have not been named in testamentary documents actually executed by the decedent.
That’s what the general manager of a car dealership in Savannah, GA, has learned the hard way.
A claim for a $338,000 charitable contribution deduction for the gift of a 50% interest in an airplane has been denied by the Tax Court because it was not accompanied by a statutorily compliant contemporaneous written acknowledgment.
Alumni trustees of Penn State University may recover the litigation costs of their successful suit to gain access to “source materials” of the Freeh Report on the Jerry Sandusky situation, the Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court has held.
The Florida Supreme Court, accepting a question certified by the state Court of Appeal, has held that an agreement by a charitable organization to make payments in lieu of taxes (“PILOTs”) to a local municipality is not unconstitutional or unenforceable. The Court of Appeal had ruled otherwise (See Nonprofit Issues, April 2015.) and the Supreme Court has reversed.
The federal District Court in the District of Columbia has ruled that a group of “individuals sharing mutual concerns” about Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem have no standing to sue the Treasury Department to force it to investigate about 200 501(c)(3) organizations and revoke their exemptions where appropriate. The District Court followed a long line of cases denying standing where the activity complained of has only a tenuous relationship to the injury complained about and where the remedy requested would not redress the injury.
It took only three meetings of the Bakersfield (CA) Green Thumb Garden Club for its members to decide that the all-volunteer club was no longer the same friendly and welcoming place it had been before the installation of the new president. They felt offended, demoralized and put off by his attitude and dictatorial manner. At a members’ meeting “a vast majority of the members present” voted to remove the current directors and reactivate the previous board until a new nominating committee could be installed to propose new officers and directors. The newly elected president w
