Today we learned that the United States Supreme Court declined to grant review at this time of the Episcopal Church Cases as decided on an interim appeal by the Supreme Court of California. (The list of petitions denied goes on for some 84 pages, so there is no need to believe St. James was singled out. The Court receives almost 8,000 petitions in the course of one term, and grants review only in about one percent of them.) The denial of review means that the California court’s decision will stand for the time being as the law of the case, which will now work its way toward a trial sometime next year. (If they remain true to form, however, the plaintiffs, the Diocese of Los Angeles and the Episcopal Church (USA), can be expected to file a motion for partial summary judgment in an attempt largely to circumvent a trial.)
The denial does not mean necessarily that the United States Supreme Court will never have anything to say about the case. The decision by the California Supreme Court, as I say, was an interim one. The trial court had struck the complaint of the Diocese, and had dismissed the separate complaint of the Church for failure to state a claim upon which any legal relief could be granted. The Fourth District Court of Appeal reversed those two decisions, and the California Supreme Court affirmed the reversals, but partly on different grounds. The effect of the reversals was to send the cases back to the trial court in Orange County, so that the defendant parishes, which in 2004 had voted to leave the Diocese, could answer the complaints and the cases could move forward from there.
Absolutely brilliant work by Haley in pulling all the pieces together!
He ought to be a lawyer. He makes sense!
w.w.
This was not the case. However, SC is a different story. It will be interested to see if TEC will try to get the Supreme Court to grant certiorari in the SC case.
Is somebody paying A.S. Haley for legal advice? I sure hope so.
subscribing please…
Intercessor
[Intercessor – please don’t add ‘subscribe’ to T19 threads – it is irritating and clogs them up. If you are interested, either read and comment on them constructively or take a note of the url. They can always be found by scrolling back through the pages. Thanks – Elf]
Haley is simply brilliant, as usual. So clear, calm, and convincing. So a hearty [b]Amen[/b] to the laudatory #1 and 3.
That being said, while not unexpected, the refusal of the US Supremes to grant review of this case means that the good guys in white hats on the orthodox side will have to endure a lot more time, and waste a lot more money, going through the protracted legal process before there is any resolution. They will need enormous strength and perseverance. May the Lord sustain them, and grant them favor in the eyes of the courts.
David Handy+