Skip to main content

The silence of Delaware politicians on secret courts is deafening . . .

As I posted yesterday, and the WNJ picked up today, Delaware's Chancery Court is trying to get the Supreme Court to reverse lower court decisions that it is illegal to have secret arbitrations for business disputes.

I love that reasoning of Andrew Pincus, the Washington DC based attorney that you and I are paying to argue against open courts:
“The challenged statute provides an efficient, cost-effective, and prompt means of resolving business disputes, and an additional reason for global firms to domicile in the United States. Because of the importance of this issue, and the job-creating potential for Delaware and the nation of finding innovative solutions to temper the growing costs and delays of resolving business disputes, a definitive answer is being sought from the Supreme Court concerning the constitutionality of the Delaware statute,” said attorney Andrew J. Pincus, a Washington D.C.-based attorney that was hired by the state to handle the appeal.
Think about this:  we should design a court system that is efficient, cost-effective, quick, and--most of all--profitable to the State of Delaware.  Note the absence of any argument that such a court system should be either just, publicly accountable, or transparent.

Governor Markell has clearly signaled that he is in favor of secret courts, touting them as just as important as Delaware beaches:
Delaware offers a high quality of life, with beautiful beaches, parks, scenic farmland, a vibrant arts community and a rich cultural and historical heritage. Furthermore, our longtime leadership in corporate law and our Court of Chancery's unmatched expertise in this area have repeatedly earned our state acclaim as the most fair and reasonable legal system for U.S. businesses.
More to the point, his decision to propose Leo Strine--who is the respondent in the lawsuit--is as clear a message as it possibly could be:  Delaware is the home of corporate privilege, and will stay that way.

Oddly, I looked around as hard as far as I could, and while I may have missed something, the response from Delaware's political class on both sides of the exclusively Democratic/Republican aisle is . . . crickets.

Presumably they'd rather take the $1.4 billion in incorporation fees that multi-billion-dollar corporations pay us each year as a bribe to allow them to settle unsightly business disputes outside that horrible public eye.

If you actually expect representatives of the two parties who created this system of secret courts at the Governor's behest in 2009 to find a spine and start discussing either secret courts or corporate welfare--or even real campaign finance reform--then you might as well keep voting for them and keep expecting the Phillies to find some new young talent.

Comments

Anonymous said…
secret court should be triple damages to state general fund. Give money to schools.
Arthur said…
So basically they want to offer corporations in Delaware what they don't want Switzerland to offer individuals?

Popular posts from this blog

Comment Rescue (?) and child-related gun violence in Delaware

In my post about the idiotic over-reaction to a New Jersey 10-year-old posing with his new squirrel rifle , Dana Garrett left me this response: One waits, apparently in vain, for you to post the annual rates of children who either shoot themselves or someone else with a gun. But then you Libertarians are notoriously ambivalent to and silent about data and facts and would rather talk abstract principles and fear monger (like the government will confiscate your guns). It doesn't require any degree of subtlety to see why you are data and fact adverse. The facts indicate we have a crisis with gun violence and accidents in the USA, and Libertarians offer nothing credible to address it. Lives, even the lives of children, get sacrificed to the fetishism of liberty. That's intellectual cowardice. OK, Dana, let's talk facts. According to the Children's Defense Fund , which is itself only querying the CDCP data base, fewer than 10 children/teens were killed per year in Delaw

With apologies to Hube: dopey WNJ comments of the week

(Well, Hube, at least I'm pulling out Facebook comments and not poaching on your preserve in the Letters.) You will all remember the case this week of the photo of the young man posing with the .22LR squirrel rifle that his Dad got him for his birthday with resulted in Family Services and the local police attempting to search his house.  The story itself is a travesty since neither the father nor the boy had done anything remotely illegal (and check out the picture for how careful the son is being not to have his finger inside the trigger guard when the photo was taken). But the incident is chiefly important for revealing in the Comments Section--within Delaware--the fact that many backers of "common sense gun laws" really do have the elimination of 2nd Amendment rights and eventual outright confiscation of all privately held firearms as their objective: Let's run that by again: Elliot Jacobson says, This instance is not a case of a father bonding with h

The Obligatory Libertarian Tax Day Post

The most disturbing factoid that I learned on Tax Day was that the average American must now spend a full twenty-four hours filling out tax forms. That's three work days. Or, think of it this way: if you had to put in two hours per night after dinner to finish your taxes, that's two weeks (with Sundays off). I saw a talking head economics professor on some Philly TV channel pontificating about how Americans procrastinate. He was laughing. The IRS guy they interviewed actually said, "Tick, tick, tick." You have to wonder if Governor Ruth Ann Minner and her cohorts put in twenty-four hours pondering whether or not to give Kraft Foods $708,000 of our State taxes while demanding that school districts return $8-10 million each?