MINNEAPOLIS (MN)
MPR News
June 1, 2018
Interview of Jonathan Lipson by Tom Crann
After years of legal wrangling, clergy sex abuse survivors and the Twin Cities archdiocese announced a $210 million settlement this week.
There’s still a lot we don’t know yet. Among the big unanswered questions is how the settlement will be allocated. In other cases around the country, the process has ranged from amicable to acrimonious.
Jonathan Lipson, a professor of law at Temple University in Philadelphia with expertise in diocesan bankruptcies, spoke to All Things Considered host Tom Crann about what to watch for as the settlement process proceeds.
Q: There are some 450 victims here. How is it decided who gets how much?
It sounds from what little we know about the settlement there will be effectively a pot of money created by contributions from insurance companies and from the archdiocese itself. Then two things would have to happen: Number one, the claimants would [each] have to demonstrate that the archdiocese actually was liable. Number two, you have to figure out for how much.
Q: How has this process played out in other situations where there has been a similar settlement?
It varies, and the most important question is “what is the level of acrimony?” In cases that have been more amicable, like the Tucson case, for example, I think it was fairly easy for the victims and the church to decide exactly how much was owed and then to pay it out. So, there wasn’t much more wrangling.
In Milwaukee, it sounds like there was still quite a bit of wrangling and here, I don’t know exactly what the tenor of the relationship is between the victims and their attorney on one hand on the archdiocese on the other. If they truly have reconciled in some way, it could be a fairly quick and painless process. But if they haven’t resolved the claims at that level of detail they might still find themselves in dispute.·
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