Lawyers practicing in the Delaware Court of Chancery or advising Delaware corporations about Delaware corporate law read, inquire about, cite, and disseminate transcript rulings, which are also known as bench rulings. To the practitioner, they are an indispensable tool. They influence our behavior and those of our adversaries. They help predict future litigation outcomes. In that Holmesian sense, they constitute law: “The prophecies of what the courts will do in fact, and nothing more pretentious, are what I mean by the law.”
In the Delaware Court of Chancery, leadership applications, expedition motions, scheduling disputes, discovery motions, settlement hearings, and fee applications are regularly adjudicated orally or by entry of short minute orders. Merits rulings, such as motions to dismiss, preliminary injunction applications, advancement of legal fees, and summary judgment motions may also be adjudicated orally. A large corpus of unpublished rulings address all aspects of corporate law litigation.
Court of Chancery practitioners have long collected for future reference transcript rulings, letter opinions, orders, and other unpublished decisions. It was not until the 1990s that unpublished memorandum opinions and letter opinions became widely available on Lexis. Upon the publication a generation ago of a treatise on Delaware Court of Chancery practice, a book review attested to the treatise’s utility in light of practitioners’ prior need to collect unpublished rulings.
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