Diamond Dust

1: Paragraph 1 Delaware is the opposite of the old cliche: not much to visit, but a great place to live. To Amtrak passengers in the northeast corridor, it's a station between Baltimore and Philadelphia; to drivers on Interstate 95, it's not even a wide place in the road between Washington and New York; to its residents, it's one of the best-kept secrets around - a pearl not to be cast before swinish outsiders.

1: Paragraph 2 As nearly as anyone knows, the state's population is somewhere around 700,000. Although it's the second smallest state in area and has only three counties, there is a marked polarity between the relatively urbanized northern tip of the state, where most of the population is concentrated in Wilmington, and what they often call "slower Delaware," usually defined as "below the [Chesapeake & Delaware] canal."

1: Paragraph 3 Someone seeking a symbol of Wilmington to put on souvenirs - in case anyone would ever want a souvenir of Wilmington - would probably pick the equestrian statue of Declaration of Independence signer Caesar Rodney that usually stands in Rodney Square, a grassy one-block plaza in the middle of town. He was the hero who had gone home to die but returned to Independence Hall to cast the tie-breaking vote in the Delaware delegation in favor of the Declaration; we're still arguing about whether he died of cancer or syphilis.

1: Paragraph 4 They took his statue down a year or so ago to fix it, and its massive plinth looks like a ruin standing across the street from the Hotel du Pont that takes up most of the block on the west of the Square. The block east of the Square is occupied by the Public Building housing the state trial courts for the county. Facing the Square on its south is the public library, and on its north is the headquarters of Wilmington Trust Company, the favorite bank of the duPont family and E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Company, Inc. Standing in Rodney Square, you're physically less than five miles from New Jersey, ten from Pennsylvania, and fifteen from Maryland, but in most ways you're in a different world.

1: Paragraph 5 Until about two decades ago the duPonts ran Delaware as a company town, and they ran a tight ship. For example, once upon a time du Pont wanted to hire a high-level executive; a candidate and his family passed muster, and he was offered the position. He said the only problem with moving to Delaware was that his daughter was taking ice skating lessons and hoped someday to qualify for the Olympics, and there was no teacher of that caliber in Delaware. Today there are, at the two Olympic-sized rinks down the road from Wilmington in Newark; one is where Calla Urbanski and Rocky Marvel trained for the 1992 Winter Olympics.

1: Paragraph 6 I heard that story in 1974 from the people who interviewed me for a job on the professional staff of the University of Delaware, whose main campus is in Newark. Their theme was that Delaware was, and would remain, the kind of place where I would want to be, because du Pont would always exert its influence to insure that Delaware was the kind of place the kind of people it wanted to attract would want to live.

1: Paragraph 7 They also explained to me that U. of D. was a private, not a public, school because if it were public it would be subject to the federal anti-segregation laws, and nobody wanted that. So in an arrangement that may be unique, and which is often called "semi-private," instead of making the school the state university and having the legislature appropriate money from the general treasury for it, each year the General Assembly votes for a voluntary donation to the private school, on behalf of the taxpayers of Delaware, out of the treasury.

1: Paragraph 8 Partly because of its small size, and partly because of du Pont's historic paternalism, Delaware in general, and Wilmington in particular, don't suffer today from the problems that plague so many parts of our country, especially the major cities. And the problems Delaware does have are largely the result of du Pont's abdication of that r le, leaving the kind of power vacuum that inevitably attracts scoundrels to public office.

1: Paragraph 9 Delaware's economy is, of course, the product of that political situation. Du Pont is by far the greatest economic power in the state, but Hercules Incorporated and ICI Americas Inc. are players, too, especially in Wilmington. Downstate is agricultural, except for the summer shore resorts, just north of the border with Maryland, at the other end of the ferry from Cape May, New Jersey. Peaches and other fruit were a big cash crop early in this century, but a blight killed most of the orchards, some of which are still standing, eerily beautiful, like rows of surreal black skeletons. Today much of the country's scrapple is made in Delaware, but the main agribusiness is the "chicken factories" where poultry is processed and packaged for supermarkets - some people will tell you lower Delaware is God's country, but many will tell you it's Frank Purdue's.

1: Paragraph 10 Although there is a big Air Force base in Dover, the federal government is a relatively minor economic force, so federal pork barrels don't influence Delaware politics much. State and local governments don't employ a lot of people, and many government employees, even some of the highest elected officials, are allowed to have private employment at the same time, so political pigs have access to slop from other sources, not just the public trough. The office of Attorney General, for example, is established in the state constitution; the AG heads the Department of Justice, is elected in a statewide election every four years, and stands third in line to become governor if something happens to the governor, the lieutenant governor, and the secretary of state. The AG can invalidate state statutes simply by issuing a written opinion, and no criminal complaint can even be filed, much less prosecuted, without the AG's approval; in short, as Delaware's lawyer, the AG has complete control over all legal processes that involve the state government.

1: Paragraph 11 Incumbent AG Charles M. Oberly III, first elected in 1982, shortly started publishing a newsletter as a private business. Questions were raised as to whether that was ethical or even lawful, but Oberly exercised his power to rule it was okay. That's what they mean by, "There's no excuse for losing if you're keeping score." Today that newsletter, which reports the rulings in some cases in Delaware courts, is written by Deputy AGs and typed by secretaries in the Dept. of Justice, both in the course of their public employment. But the subscription money goes to Oberly personally, and although the quality of the newsletter is poor, compared to competing publications, the subscription price is lower, too, because Oberly doesn't have the same production costs as his competitors, and some of his subscribers have told me they see it as legal insurance - they've noticed the Dept. of Justice is more attentive to the needs of subscribers, and they more often enjoy favorable results in legal proceedings, than nonsubscribers.

1: Paragraph 12 Oberly has rejected offers to purchase his newsletter business for more than it's worth, because he wants to keep that ostensibly legitimate mechanism for collecting money from the citizens he's pledged to serve. You get what you pay for. That story was told to me by several persons, including some of the competing publishers, who had offered to buy Oberly out, while I was working for them, but many other elected officers have lucrative private sidelines. The county Recorder of Deeds and Register of Wills, for example, both have private law practices besides those elective, salaried positions that provide them offices and staffs in the public buildings in Wilmington.

1: Paragraph 13 So does the Public Defender, who is appointed, not elected. Lawrence M. Sullivan has been Delaware's PD for more than twenty years, and most indigent criminal defendants in state court are represented by one of his deputy PDs, who also have private law practices on the side. The poor quality of these representations have been an open scandal for years: In 1981, in an opinion in 'Waters v. State', published at 440 'Atlantic Reporter' 2d 321, the Delaware Supreme Court took Sullivan to task for trying to shirk responsibility for the inadequacy of the legal services he provided. It has been traditional for the PDs to divert defendants who can come up with any money, usually from their families, to their private practices; a very few indigent defendants, usually repeat offenders who learned the first time around how much help the PD is, demand and get independent lawyers appointed and paid by the court.

1: Paragraph 14 The defendants stuck with the PD are often worse off than if they had no lawyer at all, because they rely on the bum advice they get from a lawyer who gets paid the same salary no matter how much or little time he spends on their case and resents taking the time away from his private practice, where he can bill by the hour. Take the case of Susan J. Scott, for example: On 20 September 1986 she fatally shot her live-in boyfriend who had been violently assaulting her for the five years they had been together. She was arrested, charged in Delaware Superior Court with first-degree murder and possession of a deadly weapon during the commission of a felony.

1: Paragraph 15 She was represented by one PD for about a year, and then he left the PD's office, so her case was assigned to another deputy PD named Duane D. Werb. Although he knew there was evidence supporting Scott's self-defense claim, Werb advised her that the "battered woman defense" wouldn't fly in Delaware, that there wasn't enough evidence to prove self defense at trial, that proving self defense couldn't clear her of the lesser included offense of manslaughter, and that if she pled guilty to manslaughter she would receive a sentence of three and a half to seven years in prison. So on 26 May 1988, a week before her trial was supposed to start, Scott took Werb's advice and pled guilty to manslaughter; she was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison.

1: Paragraph 16 Then Scott's family managed to scrape up the money to hire New Orleans lawyer Richard Ducote, with a national reputation for representing battered women, to try to get her sentence reduced. On 19 July 1989 Judge John E. Babiarz Jr., who had accepted Scott's guilty plea and sentenced her, reversed her conviction in a written opinion ruling that Werb had committed legal malpractice by giving her advice that was blatantly wrong on three separate points of law. The two charges against her were reinstated, and Scott's trial was scheduled for 16 October. That morning the deputy AG offered another plea agreement: If she would plead guilty to manslaughter, she would be sentenced to three years, which was how long she'd been in maximum security by then. So she pled guilty and was immediately released from prison.

1: Paragraph 17 Scott wanted to sue the PD for legal malpractice, and Ducote was willing to represent her in that suit, but he had trouble finding a member of the Delaware bar willing to go up against the PD, and he had to have a Delaware lawyer to act as local counsel because he wasn't licensed to practice law here. He finally asked the Delaware ACLU for help, but all they did was give him my name; I agreed to be local counsel in the case, and that's why I came to know about it.

1: Paragraph 18 On 15 August 1991 we filed Scott's civil complaint in Superior Court, against Sullivan and Werb. Remember that the prosecutor in the criminal case had been the AG and that a Superior Court judge had already ruled the PD committed legal malpractice. Now the AG appeared on behalf of the PD, because the AG is the lawyer who represents all state employees, and Superior Court Judge Vincent J. Poppiti summarily dismissed the complaint: He ruled that because Scott had pled guilty to manslaughter, the same as she did on Werb's advice, she could not have been harmed by any wrong advice he gave her! That dismissal was recently affirmed by the Delaware Supreme Court.

1: Paragraph 19 That story illustrates not only the incestuous (if not downright masturbatory) nature of Delaware's criminal justice system but also the distinctive feature of Delaware civil litigation: Most participants in civil litigation are from out of state, and they have to pay featherbedding Delaware lawyers to hold the courthouse doors open for them.

1: Paragraph 20 A couple of years ago the American Bar Association rated Delaware as fourth in the country in the number of lawyers per capita, and that's true as far as the numbers go, but it gives a false impression: Many of the lawyers in Delaware are employed in companies other than law firms, so they're not available for hire by other clients; many of the lawyers working in banks or other companies are not admitted to the Delaware bar, so they couldn't go into private practice anyhow. Unlike many states, Delaware no longer cuts lawyers from other states any slack in getting into the Delaware bar, and every candidate for admission has to take the same bar exam and perform the same clerkship, no matter how long the person may have been a lawyer (or even a judge) elsewhere. This anti-carpetbagger rule was made by the all-lawyer state Supreme Court, not the nearly lawyer-free legislature (now 1 of 21 senators; 1 of 41 representatives), and ensures that there won't be too many lawyers (about 1900 now) compared to the amount of business, but it has the effect of decreasing competition, and I firmly believe that free-market competition is always good and is what made this country great.

1: Paragraph 21 In many places, the lawyers who make the most money are the ones who do personal injury litigation - that's why you see so many commercials for that kind of business wherever lawyers are allowed to advertise on television. PI lawyers usually work for a contingency fee (often a third of the amount recovered), meaning they get paid only if they win, and the plaintiff doesn't pay any up-front legal fees. That's why there's too much litigation in this country: No matter how bogus the suits are, a lawyer who files enough of them will sometimes hit the jackpot; defendants often settle for nuisance value to avoid the humongous legal expenses they will incur even if they end up winning, and it doesn't cost plaintiffs anything to sue, so if they lose they're not out anything, and if they win they come out ahead.

1: Paragraph 22 In Delaware it's not like that. The big-ticket legal cases here are not over personal injuries but over corporation law, and we have a special court for litigating corporation cases, the Chancery Court. Chancery or equity court started in England in the late 1300s and over the centuries developed a separate structure similar to that of the so-called law courts, and certain types of cases became associated with one or the other. By the time America was settled, it was established that criminal prosecutions and civil suits for money damages were legal cases, while probate, adoptions, and civil suits for injunctions were equity cases. One of the main distinctions between them was that there were no juries in chancery.

1: Paragraph 23 A trustee is a person who has agreed to hold or manage property for someone else's benefit, and anything to do with trusts is within the equity court's jurisdiction. The idea of a corporation is that its directors are trustees for its stockholders, managing the money they paid for their shares for their benefit, so any litigation over corporate affairs is a chancery case.

1: Paragraph 24 The federal District Courts have both legal and equitable jurisdiction, but only in cases where there is federal jurisdiction over the subject matter, of course, and most states have similarly combined the two courts into one, although some states maintain a distinction between the law division and equity division of the court. In Delaware the Superior Court has jurisdiction over cases that are legal only and the Chancery Court has jurisdiction over every case where either the subject matter or the relief sought includes any equitable component.

1: Paragraph 25 So in Delaware if you want to sue your neighbor for the cost of fixing your garage when he overshot his driveway and smashed into it, you do that in Superior Court; if you want to enjoin him from driving across your property in the future, you do that in Chancery; and if you want to do both in one suit, you have to do that in Chancery, too, because the Chancery Court has jurisdiction over legal claims related to equitable claims, but the Superior Court doesn't have jurisdiction over equitable claims related to legal ones.

1: Paragraph 26 The Chancery Court now has five judges: Chancellor William T. Allen, who is rated one of the best chancellors in living memory, and four vice chancellors of varying lesser ability. Most of the cases that come to them involve either trusts or corporations, and there are no juries, so they make all the decisions in every case, and that gives them an awful lot of experience. Unfortunately it's like what John F. Kennedy said about the difference between ten years of experience and one year of experience ten times: They keep getting cases that are exactly the same except for the name of the corporation. I often wonder why they're still writing opinions from scratch when they come to the same result and take so long; they have word processors, so they should load standard paragraphs and then do their opinions by selecting from a menu.

1: Paragraph 27 There are, after all, only two possible rulings on a motion for anything - it's either granted, or it's denied - and the recurring issues have well established standards the court is required to consider. Probably the most frequent issue they decide is the motion for preliminary injunction: Every time the Wall Street Journal says there's going to be a tender offer for a company, at least one of its stockholders files a class action to enjoin the deal. There are three points a party has to prove to get a preliminary injunction, so the Chancery Court should have a one-page preliminary injunction opinion form that has, for each of those three questions, a "no" box and a "yes" box with a blank next to it for the judge to fill in the fact that proved that point. Then the word processor could spit out the standardized preliminary injunction opinion with those customizations - "You may have already won a preliminary injunction, Plaintiff Insert Name Here" - and citations to the latest precedents on each point.

1: Paragraph 28 So why don't they do that, if it would be easier and faster? Because the big legal business in Delaware is corporation litigation, and nobody here wants to streamline the process and so cut down on the profits from it. Most lawyers in Wilmington (which is the bulk of the lawyers in Delaware, using that word in several different senses) are or want to be local counsel for out-of-state lawyers in corporation cases; the ethics rules governing lawyers say they can't split fees except in the same proportions they split the work, and the only work local counsel can usually claim to do is supply the expertise on local practice and precedents. Because the procedural rules in Superior Court are very similar to those of the federal courts, and the Chancery Court rules are virtually identical to the federal rules, lawyers from anywhere in the country already know as much as they need to about local practice here, so all that's left for local counsel to do is provide gossip about the judge or other lawyers in the case and citations to prior opinions that have not been published in the national reporters. So Chancery Court issues tons of opinions that aren't published, say the same thing over and over again, and give local counsel the right to claim a large percentage of the fee for reviewing pertinent opinions.

1: Paragraph 29 Delaware is the corporation capital, and some writers have said corporation whore, of the country: More corporations are chartered here than in all the other states put together, and Delaware actively encourages that with its laws governing corporate affairs and taxes. When you're going to sue a corporation, you have a choice about where to do it, and one of the choices is always a court in the state where the corporation is chartered, whether it does any business there or not. So most corporations can be sued in Delaware because they're incorporated here.

1: Paragraph 30 Until November 1991 everybody knew a corporation could always sue somebody else in the state where the corporation plaintiff was chartered, but then the Superior Court handed down a decision throwing out a case filed by a Delaware corporation against a whole slew of insurance companies for not covering claims against the plaintiff for hazardous waste dumps. The Chancery Court would never have made a ruling like that, and the lawyers here are hopping and howling at the prospect of losing the chance to be local counsel in some of those cases - they're trying to get the legislature to pass a law guaranteeing the "right" of a Delaware corporation to drag defendants into Delaware courts whenever they want to.

1: Paragraph 31 Remember that most Delaware lawyers want to be local counsel in corporate cases, and a lawyer who goes up against corporations will be blacklisted and never be hired to represent corporations. A plaintiff in a personal injury suit sues whoever did the injury, but in effect the suit is usually against an insurance company - in a car accident case, it's the auto insurance; in a medical malpractice case, its the doctor's professional insurance; in a product liability or slip-and-fall case, it's the casualty insurance; and in tender-offer cases, it's the directors' E&O insurance - so insurance companies pay the lawyers in many cases. The bottom line is that a person in Delaware who wants to file a personal injury suit can't usually find a good lawyer here to do it, because the lawyers don't want to go up against the insurance companies and run the risk of never being hired by those companies in the future.

1: Paragraph 32 The United States was founded on the idea of individuals' rights, but in Delaware corporations count for more than people do now. Take the top state officials: The governor and lieutenant governor are elected separately, so we can, and recently did, have a governor who was a Republican and a lieutenant who was a Democrat. The governor appoints the Secretary of State, who regulates corporations - entities that contribute lots of money to campaigns but can't vote and usually aren't in Delaware anyhow. If something happens to incapacitate the governor and lieutenant governor, the Secretary of State becomes governor; if something happens to him, the AG elected by the people becomes governor. That shows that Delaware puts the interests of corporations ahead of the interests of voting individuals. Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln must be spinning in their graves.

1: Paragraph 33 My civil procedure professor used to joke about the "lawyers' full-employment act," and nowhere does that concept command more respect than in Delaware. Non-Delaware lawyers working inside companies here usually don't bother to apply for admission to the Delaware bar, and swell its ranks, because the Bar Association and every other privilege extended to lawyers is equally open to lawyers working, but not admitted to practice, here. One reason there are never very many lawyers in the General Assembly is that there are not enough lawyer to spare - you can make a lot more money double-billing clients in Wilmington than driving down to Dover to sit in the legislature.

1: Paragraph 34 Ever since 'Marbury v. Madison' it's been accepted that the judiciary can overrule the executive, but in the federal system Congress can usually overrule the Supreme Court legislatively. But in Delaware if the legislature passes a law that disfavors lawyers or that lawyers disfavor, the AG invalidates it; so, contrary to the theory of tripartite government with checks and balances, we have a member of the executive exercising ultimate control over the legislature. Spin, Tom. Spin, Abe. Spin, spin, spin.

1: Paragraph 35 One novel aspect to the old-boy network in Delaware is that it's easier here for a woman to become a judge than a senior partner in a big law firm. Although there has not yet been a female justice on the Supreme Court, there are women on the benches of the other courts. With two notable exceptions, they are mostly women who had been with largish local firms long enough that the firms faced the prospect of making them senior partners, and that wouldn't do; so the senior partners used their influence to have the women appointed judges, because Delaware is a state where judges are appointed, not elected. The two exceptions are Vice Chancellor Carolyn Berger, whose husband Fred S. Silverman is AG Oberly's right-hand-man and actually runs the Dept. of Justice, and Judge Jane R. Roth, who is now on the bench of the Third Circuit federal appellate court but was until recently one of the federal District Court judges here and whose husband is Delaware's Republican in the U. S. Senate, William V. Roth Jr.

1: Paragraph 36 So the legal system in Delaware is like a medieval fiefdom. He who pays the piper calls the tune, and here that's the out-of-state corporations and their lawyers. The citizens are in the same predicament as the serfs when itinerant knights employed by absentee overlords rampaged across the land, destroying crops, herds, and sometimes the villeins themselves while fighting each other over esoteric points of honor nobody ever explained to the peasants because it had nothing to do with them anyhow.

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