LDS church to reveal total net worth?
 

http://deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,685193003,00.html

I doubt it. This will likely get settled as both parties know this ruling will be appealed and appealed some more.

This does pose a huge problem for the church, though. The US is fairly litigious, but I am even more concerned about foreign courts. I would venture a guess that the church will be increasingly sued by foreign nationals in foreign courts for gigantic amounts of money, and the church will lose many of those cases. If a jury is used in those courts, how many juries would rule against the hometown victim in favor of a US based church?

How can the church avoid this problem or mitigate it? It has the potential to destroy the church internationally. Rather than pay an exorbitant amount of money in punitive damages, I could see them simply leaving the country altogether.

In the US, they have tried to mitigate the problem by incorporating the church as a separate entity in all 50 states. As a result, if the church is sued in any state, it is the church's operating entity in that state that is sued and not the global church. Thus, the church only has to divulge the operating revenues of the entity for that specific state rather than the operating revenues of the global church (which would be much larger, obviously). This leads to smaller punitive damage awards, since punitive damages are designed to harm the entity and are based on the net worth of the entity to determine what amount would be harmful to them.

I am rambling a bit, but any thoughts?

To some extent, that has already occurred. I know for a fact that the church in Russia is a separate legal entity.

P.S. How on earth is the church liable for these kinds of suits? What garbage.

as it was explained on CB, if a UPS driver runs a red light and hits you, you are not likely to only sue the driver. You will sue UPS as well, because the driver was an agent of UPS.

Thus it could be construed the home teacher was an agent of the church.

I don't know if this is sound legal thinking or not, however.

Not to change the subject, but this is exactly what's going on now in the Caterpillar case. Rachel Corrie, an anti-Israel protester in Gaza, was killed by one of Caterpillar's bulldozers when she wasn't smart enough to get out of its way. It was nearly worthy of a Darwin award.

Proving that idiots come from idiot stock, the parents are suing the company. For the 2nd time. There really ought to be some way to prevent stuff like this.

In this specific instance, the case had already been dismissed two years ago, so at the very least the basic facts should already be known.

But in a general sense, there ought to be a penalty for plantiffs who lose frivolous lawsuits. I'll leave the debate about what constitutes "frivolous" or what would be a fair penalty to others, but as a principle, there should be a deterrent to try and winnow out unserious cases.

I agree that there isn't a better system overall anywhere in the world. That doesn't mean we can't improve on the one we have.

Here's an example of the legal system out of control, that affected people I know:

http://www.petsforum.com/psw/

http://www.catdestroyshomes.org/article.php?id=559

It looks like an interesting case. The family isn't suing Caterpillar because of a manufacturers defect, but rather because they are supplying Israel with machines that are used to destroy Palestinian homes. Seems like specious grounds, but Chemerinsky is arguing on behalf of the family. I would really be interested in hearing what he has to say.

I've heard him talk about it on HughHewitt's program, and I'm not that impressed. You can hear the clip here, 4th one down about 10 minutes into it:

http://www.townhall.com/talkradio/Sh...?RadioShowID=5

Thanks.