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To litigate or legislate? The Texas approach to building corporate law

Litigation Daily

When I started thinking about what to write about the one-year anniversary of Texas launching its business courts, two things struck me.

One, despite knowing what’s going on in Texas now being a sizable chunk of my job, I’ve never actually been there (unless you count the time American Airlines changed my flight schedule to include a some-expenses-paid overnight layover in a hotel just outside DFW).

Two, I can’t help but compare the conversation about how Texas’ legislature interacts with its business courts to what we’ve seen and heard this year out of Delaware. The central question in both venues is how much say legislators should have in shaping business law, and how much should be left to the courts.

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A brief history behind DExit and the biggest beef in Del. corporate law

Litigation Daily

When I’m not covering corporate litigation, one of my guilty pleasures is watching reality television shows on Bravo.

Now that Tom Girardi is done with both, corporate litigation and Bravo don’t typically have much overlap. But in the past two months, the public feuding I’ve seen both during legislative hearings and online has been more dramatic than anything I’m expecting from the “Vanderpump Rules” recasting.

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How corporate law legislation morphed into a conversation on judicial ethics

Litigation Daily

Two weeks ago, Delaware enacted a series of amendments to its corporation law, as it does every summer. 

Unlike every other summer, two weeks after the amendments went into effect, those who watch the Court of Chancery closely are still offering public critique. But alongside that discussion, a secondary debate has broken out about when judges on the Court of Chancery, with its signature decorum, should and should not weigh in on laws they will later apply to Delaware’s corporate franchise.

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S.D. facilities both keep prisoners in and reporters out

The Daily Republic

Criminals’ stories do not end when they’re put behind bars.

But with the little access South Dakota prisons currently offer to media, the parts of their stories we’re able to tell are often forced to end when someone is put under Department of Corrections supervision. While the DOC clearly has a responsibility to keep its facilities secure and keep close track of who is coming and going, it’s still a public agency, and it shouldn’t be able to be as stringent as it is with media access.

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Biting into SD’s open record laws

The Daily Republic

Read the original column here.

On Thursday, I drove about two hours to Gregory, spent three minutes in the Gregory School District office, and then drove the 110 miles back to Mitchell. Why? Because that’s the only way anyone in the district would give me the answers to three questions about school lunches.

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