Any person, being the bishop, overseer, or presiding elder of any church or religious denomination in this state, may, in conformity with the constitution, canons, rules, regulations, or discipline of such church or denomination, become a corporation sole, in the manner prescribed in this chapter, as nearly as may be; and, thereupon, said bishop, overseer, or presiding elder, as the case may be, together with his or her successors in office or position, by his or her official designation, shall be held and deemed to be a body corporate, with all the rights and powers prescribed in the case of corporations aggregate; and with all the privileges provided by law for religious corporations.
RCW 24.12.010
Corporations sole—Church and religious societies.
Applied in 4 court decisions — leading case Munns v. Martin (1997)
Most recently applied in Committee of Tort Litigants v. Catholic Diocese of Spokane (In Re the Catholic Bishop of Spokane) (August 2005)
2011 c 336 s 671; 1915 c 79 s 1; RRS s 3884.
How often courts cite this section
Court decisions citing this, by year. The dip in the last several years is a data-coverage gap, not a real trend — our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so recent citations are undercounted.
Official source: Washington State Legislature. Reproduced from public-domain Washington statutes; confirm against the official source for the current text. Not legal advice.