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	Judge to Rule in Mid-March on Motions in Priest Lawsuit Associated Press, carried on KTVA [Alaska] March 5, 2007 http://www.ktva.com/alaska/ci_5360610 A judge says he decide in about two weeks on motions in a lawsuit asking that a Jesuit priest who impregnated two women decades ago pay child support to his two grown sons. Judge Peter Ashman heard oral arguments Friday on motions in the case against the Reverend James Jacobson, an 83-year-old former Jesuit priest. Ashman says he will rule by March 16th. Among items he will decide is whether the statute of limitations on bringing a lawsuit had expired. He also will decide whether Jacobson's vow of poverty and transfer of earnings and other assets to his religious order, and its obligations to provide for him, can make it liable for unpaid child support. Jacobson has turned his earnings over to the Society of Jesus Oregon Province, which covers Alaska, and attorneys for the order say it is not liable for a child support debt. The lawsuit against Jacobson was filed by the two unnamed men and the mother of one of them. One son had sought nearly 325,000 dollars in child support and the other more than 270,000 dollars, figures attorney Chris Cooke said had changed upward because interest accumulation had been miscalculated. Jacobson worked in Alaska from about 1961, to 1976, in Yup'ik villages in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta. After leaving Alaska, Jacobson worked as a paid chaplain in a prison in Oregon from 1979, to 2005. He currently lives in a Jesuit home in Spokane, Wash.
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