In a ruling today (in Huntsman v. Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints), an en banc panel of the Ninth Circuit ruled unanimously against a former member of the LDS Church who claimed that the church had committed fraud in its use of tithing funds. But the panel members split sharply over the role that the First Amendment’s “church autonomy” doctrine played in their decision.
Writing for a six-judge liberal majority, Judge Michelle Friedland ruled that the district court properly granted summary judgment to the church, as “no reasonable juror could find that the Church had misrepresented how it used tithing funds.” She states that “the church autonomy doctrine has no bearing here,” as “nothing in our analysis of Huntsman’s fraud claims delves into matters of Church doctrine or policy.”
On a first read, I don’t find Friedland’s summary-judgment analysis especially convincing, and I have to wonder whether it was driven (consciously or not) by a desire to avoid teeing up the case to be decided by the Supreme Court on church-autonomy grounds.
The five other judges concurred in the judgment and would have ruled for the LDS Church on the basis of the church-autonomy doctrine. Judge Daniel Bress wrote the lead concurring opinion (slip op. at 19-34), joined by Judge Milan Smith, Judge Jacqueline Nguyen (an Obama appointee), and in all but two footnotes by Judge Lawrence VanDyke. Observing that the lawsuit is a “not-so thinly concealed effort to challenge the Church’s belief system under the guise of litigation,” Bress determines that “there is no way in which the plaintiff here could prevail without running headlong into basic First Amendment prohibitions on courts resolving ecclesiastical disputes.” In particular, “for Huntsman to prevail, a court or jury would need to agree with his view of what ‘tithing funds’ in the Church includes”—in particular, whether it includes earnings on previously tithed funds. “But [deciding that matter] would intrude on the Church’s authority to define that divine concept for itself.” Likewise, the question whether Huntsman reasonably relied on the church’s alleged misrepresentations would require a court or to decide whether a reasonable of the church would pay tithing based on the church’s representations.
In a long solo opinion concurring in the judgment (pp. 34-63), Judge Patrick Bumatay maintains that a court is always obligated to decide a church-autonomy question first.
The Ninth Circuit panel that originally decided this appeal—majority opinion by Judge William Fletcher, joined by Judge Kim McLane Wardlaw—ruled that the church was not entitled to summary judgment and that the church-autonomy doctrine did not bar the lawsuit.
(Just a reminder that the Ninth Circuit is unique among the federal appellate courts in deciding en banc matters via a limited en banc panel, which consists of the chief judge and ten other judges drawn by lot.)