Yesterday morning, I decided to log on to Bloomberg Law to check out the status of the Huntsman lawsuit against the church. You know, as one does.
It turns out the Ninth Circuit hasn’t really made any moves there. So I decided to take a quick look at the docket for Tim Teichert’s lawsuit against the church. I wrote about the Teichert suit (and, for that matter, the Huntsman one) for the first time almost three years ago. And, unlike the Huntsman case, there is recent and significant movement in the case of the Teichert lawsuit.
A quick review of what’s at stake: in 2021, Tim Teichert, grandson of artist Minerva and executor of her estate, sued the church. See, the church had removed three of her paintings from the Cokeville meetinghouse where they had been for a long time. Tim argued that the paintings actually belonged to the estate: either, he said, they had been lent to the church or they had been a conditional gift, given only as long as they stayed in Cokeville. Either way, he wanted the estate to get possession of the paintings.
The church moved for summary judgment affirming that it had unconditional ownership of the paintings. And what is summary judgment? Basically, it means that the moving party asserts that there is no disagreement about any important fact and, based on the facts, there’s no way that the law supports the other party. Here, since the church was moving for summary judgment, it’s basically saying, Assume the facts we’ve agreed on are true. Based on those facts, the law says we win.
On May 3, 2024, the court ruled on the church’s motion. Its ruling agreed with the church in part and disagreed in part.
It agreed that, based on reading the facts most favorably to Tim Teichert, there was no way to say there had been a conditional gift. That is, if the paintings belong to the church, they belong to the church whether the church leaves them in the Cokeville building or hangs them in the Church Office Building.
But, it said, reading the facts most favorably to Tim Teichert, it cannot rule that Minerva Teichert gifted the paintings to the church (or paid them as tithing). There is factual dispute there, the type of dispute that has to be resolved by a jury. As such, the court set a trial date of May 6-10.
Trial dates, from what I understand, focus litigants’ minds. And here, that seems to have happened. Because, according to the docket, on May 6, set to be the first day of trial, the parties informed the court that they had come to a settlement agreement. And with that, the trial dates were cancelled.
And what is the settlement agreement? Honestly, I don’t know. They have to make a pleading for the case to be dismissed by Jun 5, but they don’t necessarily have to publicize the terms of the settlement. And honestly, it’s not clear from the order who would have been more likely to prevail. The factual issue rests on Minerva Teichert’s state of mind when she gave the three paintings to the church. But, as the court notes, nobody who was present when she gave the paintings to the church is alive today. And the handful of contemporaneous notes that have been unearthed are ambiguous at best.
In looking at incentives to settle, though, I have to note that both sides would have reasons to avoid a trial. The church is both risk-averse and disclosure-averse. I suspect it would prefer not to have certain things in the public record. At the same time, though, if I were Tim Teichert’s attorney, I don’t think I’d like my chances. The court was not super impressed with the plaintiff’s case. In fact, in sections of the order, the court was relatively scathing. In the order, the judge writes:
“The difficulty in evaluating the merits of this case do not stem from the action itself, but rather the onerous burden Plaintiff has placed upon this Court through disorienting semantics and shifting assertions laden with threadbare recitals of factual and legal conclusions. While noting the illusory and evolving nature of Plaintiff’s arguments, the Court addresses each in turn.”
So I honestly have no idea who felt they had the stronger hand, and therefore, what the settlement was. But the case has all but settled, and the fate of the three paintings will soon be determined.
One last thing: while there will be no adjudicated outcome, the order provides some really interesting historical color. In 1929, someone from Cokeville wrote to Salt Lake saying an artist (Minerva Teichert, though the letter apparently doesn’t name her) wanted to “have her name on the tithing book.” She provided two paintings and received $25 of tithing credit for those paintings.
A couple years later, she needed money to save her ranch from foreclosure and asked if she could sell one of those paintings—Handcart Pioneers 1—and replace it with a new painting. She did, in fact, sell the painting to the “general authorities of the church” and replaced it with Handcart Pioneers 2. (You can see it on p. 71 of this pdf.)
Anyway, the litigation has revealed a fascinating glimpse into the tithing (and finances) of Minerva Teichert right around the Great Depression.
Photo by Tingey Injury Law Firm on Unsplash