Courts work in different ways, and lawyers need to know the actual workings of courts where they are lawyering. That rule applies even more powerfully for specialized courts, such as the Delaware Chancery Court. The Conglomerate blog has been running a series of posts as tribute to Chancellor Chandler. This post provides some special insights into the practices at the court. One key link and quote is excerpted below; note especially the underlined text,
"David Marcus from the Deal Magazine has a terrific interview with Chancellor Chandler upon his stepping down from the Chancery. I found this exchange to be reflective of the chancellor’s views on legal scholarship:
[Q:] It was clear in reading the [Airgas] opinion that you had thought very deeply about that question, but except for your decision in Unitrin, you hadn’t had the chance to write about it until Airgas.
I got the views of all of my colleagues on the court on both the pill question, which was Airgas II, and on the bylaw question, which was Airgas I. They were very helpful to me in writing it and getting it out in a timely way. If the question is, "Would I have written this as long or in the same way?" probably not, because back when I wrote Unitrin in the mid-1990s, there hadn’t been as much ink spilled by academics. You saw a lot of academic references in the opinion, and that probably resulted in a slightly different approach to how to write it, because I was writing it for the parties but also acknowledging the views of various academics on this question from professor [Lucian] Bebchuk to others. (emphasis added by GlobalTort).
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