Newpoert Beach, Calif. ”“ Attorneys for St. James Anglican Church this week filed the opening brief with the California Supreme Court in the church’s property case with the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles and the national Episcopal Church.
The opening brief is the first step in the process that will culminate with the California Supreme Court deciding three important issues that will affect every church in California, regardless of denomination:
Issue #1: Should California courts use the “neutral principles of law” method in resolving church property disputes (followed for over a generation by courts in California and commended by the U.S. Supreme Court), or simply defer to the decisions of the church hierarchy (followed in the present case by the Fourth Appellate District, Division Three)?
Issue #2: Does California Corporations Code section 9142(c) permit a religious denomination, which does not hold title to property, to create a trust in its favor over property owned by a separate religious corporation, without the latter’s knowledge or express agreement? If so, does Corporations Code section 9142(c) violate the establishment and equal protection clauses of the United States and California Constitutions by permitting religious organizations, and only religious organizations, to create trusts over property they do not own without the express consent of the owner?
Issue #3: When a local church corporation speaks out about the actions of a religious denomination by voting to disaffiliate from it, and the denomination then challenges the validity of the disaffiliation and claims ownership of the corporation’s property, are these claims subject to early scrutiny as a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation (“SLAPP”)?
The next step will be for the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles and the national Episcopal Church to file a responsive brief. St. James will respond to their arguments in a reply brief. After the briefing of the parties is completed, others affected by the decision can file amicus briefs.
The briefing process will take at least until February 2008 to complete, perhaps longer, and then the Court will schedule oral argument.
The California Supreme Court has granted review of three similar church property cases involving All Saints’ Anglican Church, Long Beach, St. David’s, North Hollywood, and First Baptist Church, Los Lomas. Those cases are on hold pending the outcome of the St. James case. Four other cases now pending in the California Court of Appeal ”“ involving former Russian Orthodox, Assemblies of God and Episcopal churches ”“ will be directly affected by the St. James case.
This is a good brief. It will be interesting to see how the diocese and TEC respond. The diocese’s attorney is quoted in a [url=http://www.dailypilot.com/articles/2007/11/19/religion/dpt-stjames20.txt ]local newspaper[/url] as saying that the decision of the Court of Appeal, Fourth Appellate District, was correct and “thoroughly analyzed.” Saying that may be prudent but it seems to me the real reaction had to be that the good news is that the Court of Appeal decided in the diocese’s and TEC’s favor but the bad news is that the opinion is pretty bad on multiple levels. The diocese and TEC therefore are faced with explaining why they should prevail for reasons other than much of what is expressed in the opinion of the intermediate appellate court.
The diocese will respond by trying to back up the “correctness” of the apellate court decision; that is their strongest point.
By the way, Mike, thanks for the link. I had to get my last copy of the Daily Pilot by flying to Orange County, CA and driving to Newport Beach.
This is an excellent brief, as noted, but it points out how unique the California situation is — and, by implication, how each state may offer its own problems and felicities to the chancellors of seceding parishes.
Note that Kendall+’s
excessivelytactful terminology has achieved immortality of a sort, being used in an actual legal pleading:Â Â Â — Statement of Facts, para. D, p. 10
Ah yes, Craig; Kendall will some day have a well-deserved mention by the lexicographers in the creation of another numbered sub-definition of these terms in our friendly College Webster’s.
The brief’s policy arguments in favor of using ‘neutral principles’ of secular law to control property disputes are well stated. But the diocese’s and TEC’s lawyers will certainly pounce on the brief’s failure even to mention the Dennis Canon, so far as I can tell. The Dennis Canon is important here because of the Supreme Court’s dictum in Jones v. Wolf, on which the brief otherwise relies so heavily:
(Emphasis and extra paragraphing added, footnote omitted.)
The closest St. James’ brief comes to addressing this is on page 41, where it argues that under California law, the parish did not create an express trust and TEC cannot unilaterally impose a trust. But under the Jones dictum, it might be that TEC’s enactment of the Dennis Canon was just as valid a way for a trust to be created.
(I say it might be, first because a dictum is not binding, second because a canon might not be given the same stature as a constitution [although in TEC’s case I think a secular court would regard the two as equivalent], and third because I understand there’s a factual issue whether the Dennis Canon was duly enacted.)
Maybe the St. James lawyers felt they could best deal with this issue in their reply brief, and are leaving it to TEC’s lawyers to raise in their own main brief. But St. James’ failure to confront the issue squarely in the opening brief might well come across to the judges as a fearful shying away from the issue. Their failure is a slow pitch, right in the strike zone, to TEC’s lawyers, who we can safely assume will take a swing at it.
Correction: The brief does allude briefly to the Dennis Canon here and there (without naming it), describing it as an “internal rule,” and arguing on page 18 that St. James was “incorporated prior to any Episcopal ‘canon rules’ purporting to place local church property in trust . . . .” But the brief does not, so far as I can tell, mention the Supreme Court’s Jones dictum; a glaring omission.
D. C. (nos. 5 and 6): The dictum you cite makes the point that the outcome is not foreordained because the [b]parties[/b] to the dispute (plural) can alter the state of affairs before the dispute arises and the result will be effective if embodied in a legally cognizable form. The two examples given are sandwiched in between the sentence requiring that the action be taken by the parties and the sentence requiring that this be done in a legally cognizable way. (Your reparagraphing to some extent obscures this.) Your proposed application of the dictum would lack both consent by the party to the dispute against whom the trust is sought to be imposed and the observance of the formal requirements under state law for creation of a trust. In other words, it would read the Supreme Court opinion endorsing neutral principles to allow an exception for mainline hierarchical churches to fix things up unilaterally without having to observe neutral principles.
I think the answer to the erroneous application of the Jones dictum is sufficiently obvious, and embraced by the brief’s general discussion of neutral principles, that it made sense not to refer to it explicitly in the brief (just as there is a lot of other “stuff” in the Court of Appeal opinion that is not addressed explicitly). If the diocese and TEC really want to resort to it, it can, as you mention, be addressed in the reply.