European Court Affirms Jurisdiction of Ecclesiastical Courts

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In Nagy v. Hungary, (ECHR, Sept. 14, 2017), the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights, by a vote of 10-7, upheld the exclusive jurisdiction of ecclesiastical courts over contractual disputes that are matters of ecclesiastical law.  In the case, a pastor in the Reformed Church of Hungary was suspended, and ultimately removed, from his position through church disciplinary proceedings because of statements he had made in a local newspaper.  He then sued in civil courts for compensation that he says he was owed for the periods prior to his termination.  When lower courts dismissed his claims, he argued that this violated his right under Article 6(1) of the European Convention on Human Rights to a fair trial by an independent and impartial tribunal established by law in determining his civil rights.  The European Court’s majority opinion held in part:… [A]pplicant’s claim … concerned an assertion that a pecuniary claim stemming from his ecclesiastical service, governed by ecclesiastical law, was actually to be regarded as falling under the civil law…. Given the overall legal and jurisprudential framework existing in Hungary …, the domestic courts’ conclusion that the applicant’s pastoral service had been governed by ecclesiastical law and their decision to discontinue the proceedings cannot be deemed arbitrary or manifestly unreasonable…. [This] Court cannot but conclude that the applicant had no “right” which could be said, at least on arguable grounds, to be recognised under domestic law. To conclude otherwise would result in the creation by the Court, by way of interpretation of Article 6 § 1, of a substantive right which had no legal basis in the respondent State.Four separate dissenting opinions were also filed. ADF issued a press release regarding the decision.

Source: http://bppro.link/?c=W2s

6th Circuit Rejects Law Prof’s Claim That $666 Raise Was Retaliatory As “Mark of the Beast”

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In Lifter v. Cleveland State University, (6th Cir., Sept. 12, 2017), the U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed an Ohio federal district court’s dismissal of a lawsuit by two former Cleveland State University Law School professors (husband and wife) who claim that the dean had retaliated against them because of the husband’s activity in unionizing the faculty.  Plaintiff Sheldon Gelman argued that part of the retaliation was awarding him a raise of only $666 for the year.  He contended that not only did he deserve more, but that the dean chose the $666 figure as an intentional invocation of the biblical

Santa Fe Diocese Releases List of Priests Found Guilty of Sex Abuse

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On Tuesday, the Catholic Archdiocese of Santa Fe released the names of 74 priests, deacons and brothers who have been found guilty of sexually abusing a child, either by the Church (canon law), the State (criminal law), or both. The list also includes those who were laicized after being accused of sexually abusing a minor, and those publicly accused where criminal proceedings were not completed (often because of death).  AP, reporting on the release, says that it comes after decades of pressure from victims and their families.

Source: http://bppro.link/?c=VTB

Tracking the World State with Recurrent Entity Networks

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We introduce a new model, the Recurrent Entity Network (EntNet). It is
equipped with a dynamic long-term memory which allows it to maintain and update
a representation of the state of the world as it receives new data. For
language understanding tasks, it can reason on-the-fly as it reads text, not
just when it is required to answer a question or respond as is the case for a
Memory Network (Sukhbaatar et al., 2015). Like a Neural Turing Machine or
Differentiable Neural Computer (Graves et al., 2014; 2016) it maintains a fixed
size memory and can learn to perform location and content-based read and write
operations. However, unlike those models it has a simple parallel architecture
in which several memory locations can be updated simultaneously. The EntNet
sets a new state-of-the-art on the bAbI tasks, and is the first method to solve
all the tasks in the 10k training examples setting. We also demonstrate that it
can solve a reasoning task which requires a large number of supporting facts,
which other methods are not able to solve, and can generalize past its training
horizon. It can also be practically used on large scale datasets such as
Children’s Book Test, where it obtains competitive performance, reading the
story in a single pass.

Source: http://bppro.link/?c=4Dx