Increasingly, it seems, in civil litigation, following a similar trajectory in criminal law, there is no closure. Church litigation is increasingly no exception.

In September 2017 and then in December 2017, federal court and state court opinions in Patterson v Shelton, were reported herein. See the post, And Then Again, Maybe Not. In 1991, the founder and pastor of the church died. The power struggle that ensued was the stuff of legends, dueling and feuding, that is. It resulted in published appellate opinions in 2013 and 2017: 175 A3d 442 (Pa. Cmwlth. 2017); 78 A3d 1092 (PA. 2013). The first conflict involved the struggle to determine who was in charge. The second wave involved the conclusions of a forensic accounting investigator that hundreds of thousands of dollars were misappropriated by the church leadership that succeeded the founder. The third wave involved an arbitration decision in 2006 in which the arbitrator was persuaded by the forensic auditor and appointed a receiver to recover the assets of the church. The appellate court overturned the arbitration award concluding the arbitrator went beyond the scope of contractual authority in fashioning relief. See, 942 A2d 967 (Pa. Cmwlth. 2008). The fourth wave of litigation was the claim that Patterson was not a church leader but merely a member and did not have standing under the not for profit corporations statute to bring the claims. The appellate court overruled the trial court and held as a church member and beneficiary of the not for profit corporation, the church, Patterson had sufficient standing to bring claims. The fifth wave was marked by a bench trial regarding the claims conducted in 2014. The trial court concluded it did not have jurisdiction under the Ecclesiastical Abstention Doctrine of the First Amendment and dismissed the case. That had the effect of leaving the arbitration award as the last determination because the trial court, in effect, held that every decision made thereafter lacked jurisdiction. In the sixth and latest wave of Patterson v Shelton, the trial court was asked to strike its orders enforcing the arbitration award as the final judgment. The trial court declined. The appellate court affirmed.

One reason this litigation became so protracted was that the courts made two errors. The courts did not inquire into their own jurisdiction and its limits early in proceedings. The other was to allow judicial hostility to arbitration to again raise its long discredited visage. Arbitrations are no more or less effectual as dispute resolution mechanisms than jury trials. While judges may have greater experience than arbitration panels in dispute resolution, which in some cases would make a bench trial a better forum, the routine case does not benefit from such experience enough to invalidate the arbitral forum. Only arbitral forums that are either so expensive or so without procedural safeguards that their decision making is suspect are inferior in the typical routine case. However, if the parties contractually selected the forum, it should be assumed both sides knew the costs and the risks. If an arbitrator’s awarded relief seems to exceed the contractual grant of authority, the better practice is to either judicially revise the relief given or to remand to the arbitrator for the revision. Simply vacating the award leads to a quagmire.

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