[All-American]

Originally Posted by Cali Coug

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.