NEW YORK CITY—Manhattan Acting Supreme Court Justice Melvin Schweitzer has granted summary judgment to the Board of Directors of the Art Students League of New York and has tossed a lawsuit contesting the league's sale of air rights over its historic West 57th St. building, according to the Commercial Litigation Insider, an affiliate of New York Law Journal.
The Board of the League of Art Students approved the sale of its air rights to Broadway Trio, an affiliate of Extell Development, which is building a 1,440-foot high residential building next to the American Fine Arts Building, which the league owns.
In a ruling released on Friday in the case of Coraballo v. The Art Students League of New York, Judge Schweitzer granted summary judgment to the Art Students League and its Board and refused to block the air rights sale in a case brought by some league members that challenged the transaction, according to the New York Law Journal, a sister publication of Globest.com.
Judge Schweitzer issued a ruling on April 14 that denied a preliminary injunction sought by the petitioners in the case to block the air rights sale. In that ruling, the judge said that the League's Board of Directors exercised proper business judgment when it mobilized league membership “to vote on an extremely important opportunity for the league.”
In his most recent ruling, the judge was not swayed by the plaintiffs' submission of 25 affidavits and a survey conducted by the plaintiffs, which Judge Schweitzer characterized as “severely flawed.”
“Given that over 1,300 people voted in favor of the cantilever transaction, the court finds that the survey has little probative value as to the materiality of the allegedly misleading statements by the board," the judge wrote in his July 25th decision.
Moshe Mortner, an attorney who represents the petitioners, says he plans to file an appeal. In an e-mail, he states, “We brought this case as a derivative action against the league's board on behalf of more than 200 members of the Art Students League based on an improper voting process.”
Michael Volpe, a partner at Venable, which represents the league's board, says Judge Schweitzer has “consistently and definitively upheld the decision-making of the board and the process the board followed. From the art students' perspective, it would now like to move on.”
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