Key to Smith’s Diagram and Parliamentary Rules

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APPENDIX

RIGHT OF AN ASSEMBLY TO EJECT ANY ONE FROM ITS PLACE OF MEETING. - Every deliberative assembly has the right to decide who may be present during its sessions; and when the assembly, either by a rule or by a vote, decides that a certain person shall not remain in the room, it is the duty of the chairman to enforce the rule, or order, using whatever force is necessary to eject the party. KSDPR 34.1

The chairman can detail members to remove the person, without calling upon the police. If, however, in enforcing the order, any one uses harsher treatment than is necessary to remove the person, the courts have held that he, and he alone, is liable to prosecution, just the same as a policeman would be under similar circumstances. However badly the man may be abused while being removed from the room, neither the chairman nor the society are liable for damages, as in ordering his removal they did not exceed their legal rights. KSDPR 34.2

RIGHTS OF ECCLESIASTICAL TRIBUNALS. - Many of our deliberative assemblies are ecclesiastical bodies, and it is important to know how much respect will be paid to their decisions by the civil courts. KSDPR 34.3

A church became divided, and each party claimed to be the church, and therefore entitled to the church property. The case was taken into the civil courts, and finally, on appeal, to the U. S. Supreme Court, which held the case under advisement for one year, and then reversed the decision of the State Court, because it conflicted with the decision of the highest ecclesiastical court that had acted upon the case. The Supreme Court, in rendering its decision, laid down the broad principle that when a local church is but a part of a larger and more general organization or denomination, the court will accept the decision of the highest ecclesiastical tribunal to which the case has been carried within that general church organization as final, and will not inquire into the justice or injustice of its decree as between the parties before it. The officers, the ministers, the members, or the church body, which the highest judiciary of the denomination recognizes, the courts will recognize. Whom that body expels or cuts off, the court will hold to be no longer members of that church. - Robert’s Rules of Order, pp. 176, 177. KSDPR 34.4