A.S. Haley: More Court Proceedings in South Carolina

August 9, 2013

The Episcopal Church (USA) and its remnant group in South Carolina, ECSC, are hanging on to a federal trademark infringement lawsuit by their fingernails. The attorneys appeared yesterday before Senior U. S. District Judge C. Weston Houck on ECUSA Bishop vonRosenberg’s motion for a preliminary injunction under the Lanham Act against Bishop Mark Lawrence of the Episcopal Diocese of South Carolina. (For more background on the issues at stake, see this earlier post.)

As his counterpart in Texas saw the matter, so might Judge Houck: why bother to get into the messy details of a federal trademark action if the earlier case filed in State court will dispose of the matter? He indicated by a question that he was considering staying the federal action pending the outcome of the proceedings in State court. He said he would have a ruling out in “a week or so.”

Meanwhile, the State court case begun by the Rt. Rev. Mark Lawrence and his Episcopal Diocese of South Carolina is moving forward, now that it has been remanded from Judge Houck’s court. The attorneys for all parties were in court on July 11 to discuss a schedule for the case with First Circuit Judge Diane Goodstein, who issued her order eight days later. The order ensures that the case will not dawdle, but will be ready for trial by the summer of next year.

ECUSA is seeking to add additional defendants to its counterclaim, namely, the individual trustees and members of the diocesan standing committee (as a prelude to naming the rectors and vestry members of 37 individual parishes—some 500 people in all—following the same punitive strategy it has tried in other cases). The court ordered that any additional response Bishop Lawrence’s attorneys wanted to make to that motion be filed by July 22, with ECUSA’s reply due 10 days later. Those papers have now been filed, and the parties await Judge Goodstein’s ruling on the propriety of trying to add any individual defendants to the case. the rest

Court Battle Over Who Is Bishop of Episcopal Diocese of South Carolina After Schism
...After hearing about an hour of arguments, Houck stated that he should have a decision as to the fate of the suit sometime in the next seven to ten days...

Attorneys back in court in S.C. Episcopal schism