The Supreme Court of the US has released a report of its June 14 conference in which decisions were made on whether or not to hear particular cases during the October-December term of the court.

It takes at least four justices to vote to hear cases, which means that less than four were interested in reviewing the petitions from churches that lost their properties in the lower courts. Since the cases are not accepted, there is no way to know who or how many, if any, may have voted to review the cases.

The Presbyterian Layman has posted a story giving the details of how this applies to the appeal of the congregation of the Timberridge Presbyterian church and we are reprinting that story here with their permission.

On Monday, the Court denied a writ of certiorari to Timberridge Presbyterian Church in its ongoing struggle to retain its property after the state Supreme Court granted custody to the Presbytery of Greater Atlanta.

In November, the Georgia Supreme Court reversed an appellate court ruling that declared the PCUSA’s property trust clause null and void with respect to property owned by Timberridge and allowed the tract to be confiscated by the presbytery.

In March, Timberridge filed its petition to the U.S. Supreme Court, stating the primary question under consideration was: “Whether the ‘neutral principles’ doctrine embodied in the Religion Clauses of the First Amendment permits imposition of a trust on church property when the creation of that trust violates the state’s property and trust laws.”

“Multi-tiered denominational entities have been given a free pass to declare themselves beneficial owners of local church properties, taking the titled landowners’ property when churches withdraw from the denomination,” an amicus brief filed by the Presbyterian Lay Committee added. “Courts have been all too willing to permit this alienation of property even when the landowner challenges the validity of the claim of trust, and even when the purported basis for the claim of trust fails to meet state law standards for trust creation.”

According to church-property bloggers the case would have provided “an ideal vehicle” for resolving the issue of whether or not denominations may claim church property via trust clauses and adds that the facts of the Timberridge case could have provided an excellent test case for the Supreme Court since “the conflict among state courts has become widespread, to the degree that the doctrine of ‘neutral principles’ itself is threatened.”

Timberridge had been expected to argue that the Georgia Supreme Court ruling granted an exemption to religious denominations from state property laws – especially given the fact that Timberridge claims it never agreed to put its property in trust to the PCUSA and that its ownership of the property wasn’t contested.

Georgia Supreme Court Justice Carley and Chief Justice Hunstein, in their dissenting opinion in November, called the majority opinion “contrived,” adding that it “virtually ignores a necessary element of trusts … the intent of the settler, which must be ascertained with reasonable certainty for an express trust to exist.”

The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty had also filed an amicus brief in the appeal. In the brief, the group describes itself as “a non-profit, nonpartisan law firm dedicated to protecting the free expression of all religious traditions.”

“The Becket Fund is concerned that the Supreme Court of Georgia’s adoption of a unilateral denominational trust rule, in conflict with decisions by other state courts, unjustly interferes with the ability of churches to control their polities,” the brief states.

As is common practice, the court did not provide a reason for the denial in its announcement.

Source

An Anglican blogger gave some broader application in a post earlier today:

The result today for church property law is regrettable, because it means that the morass of State court decisions interpreting Jones v. Wolf, 443 U.S. 595 (1979) will remain unresolved, with some States allowing certain churches to bypass their legal requirements for the creation of a trust, and with other States requiring that all churches comply with their local trust laws.

Thus the outcome of any church-parish dispute over property will continue to turn upon the State in which it arises: if the parish is in California, Connecticut, Georgia, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York or Ohio, it will most likely lose its property; but if it is in Alaska, Arkansas, Louisiana, Missouri, New Hampshire or South Carolina, it will most likely keep its property. And if it is in Kentucky or Pennsylvania or Virginia, then the courts could hold that any national trust canon is ineffective to create a trust, but still find that a trust existed anyway.

The interesting fact is that we have never before had a Supreme Court on which there were no members of Protestant denominations. The current Court is made up of six Roman Catholics (Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Kennedy, Scalia, Thomas, Alito and Sotomayor) and three Jews (Ginsburg, Breyer and Kagan). Whether that is what determined that there were not enough justices interested in the property disputes of Protestant churches is something we shall probably never know. 

[Editor’s note: Original URLs (links) referenced in this article are no longer valid, so the links have been removed.]