December 2nd, 2009 Posted in TEC | Comments Off
By A S Haley, Anglican Curmudgeon
The Convention of the Protest Episcopal Church in the Diocese of Tennessee, a religious corporation organized under Tennessee law, and its diocesan bishop, the Rt. Rev. John C. Bauerschmidt, filed on October 30, 2009 an action in the Chancery Court of Davidson County to recover the possession of St. Andrew's, a parish in Nashville, from its vestry and rector. A copy of the complaint may be viewed or downloaded (in Adobe Acrobat format) from this link. In this series of posts, I would like to use the complaint as a prototype of the typical Dennis Canon lawsuit which is filed when a parish votes to realign with a different entity than the Episcopal Diocese of which it formerly had been a member. In this case, the parish of St. Andrew's voted to realign with the Diocese of Quincy, which since the parish's vote has itself voted to realign with the Anglican Province of the Southern Cone.
The complaint begins in conventional fashion, by naming and identifying the parties to the lawsuit, and by justifying why the case is brought in Davidson County (where the parish's property is located). The parties plaintiff are, as mentioned, the corporation which is the Diocese of Tennessee, and its current bishop, Bishop Bauerschmidt. The defendants are the Rev. James M. Guill, rector of St. Andrew's, along with the parish's Senior Warden and Vestry members, and the parish corporation itself, which goes by the name of "The Rector, Wardens, and Vestrymen of St. Andrew's Parish."
The first unusual aspect of the lawsuit to notice is that the Rector, Senior Warden and Vestry members are named as defendants individually — even though the only relief sought by the complaint is a declaration that the parish property now belongs to the Diocese, and that the bishop is entitled to take possession of it. Normally, if I were to file a lawsuit against a corporation (say, Ford Motor Company), I would name only the corporation, and not its President and the members of its Board of Directors, individually. The reason is that a corporation is regarded in the law as its own separate person, with the capacity to sue and to be sued in its own name. One would join the individual directors and officers in the lawsuit against the corporation only if those individuals committed their own civil wrongs, apart from the corporation, and thus were jointly liable with it.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
Both comments and pings are currently closed.
