"The Ascendance of the Delaware Supreme Court in American Corporate Law in the 1980s"

The article examines the ascendance of the Delaware Supreme Court during the 1980s to
become the most important court in American corporate law as one of the most important
changes in corporate law over the last half-century. The changes in Delaware starting in 1983
put more distance between the Delaware court and any other corporation law decision-maker.
This article supports that claim with key points across five parts. Section 1 looks at the Delaware
Supreme Court from its creation in 1952 through 1982. It was different and didn’t have the
preeminence often attributed to it today. How different this early period was becomes obvious
in Section 2 by comparison to three cases decided by the Delaware Supreme Court between
1983 and 1985—Weinberger, Van Gorkom, and Aronson as compared to cases decided in the
immediately preceding period. They make clear how the law was shifting in a fundamental way
as to director duties and the role of litigation. But that was just the warmup. In the next seven
months, as discussed in Section 3 another triumvirate of cases—Unocal, Moran, and Revlon--
took corporate law into the middle of hostile takeovers, unleashing an entirely new vocabulary,
new sets of lawyers, and changes in finance. This half dozen cases decided over 37 months with
a newly appointed justice, Andrew G. T. Moore II, in the lead set the frame for American
corporate law into the 2020s. Sections 4 and 5 trace the effects of this trend in the decisions
that immediately followed as well as the contributions of the Chancery Court in the 1980s and
thereafter and later Supreme Court justices over the succeeding four decades, building out a
trendline that was already in place by the mid-1980s.