An all-day seminar yesterday at Widener University Law School featured leading members of the judiciary as well as practitioners and academics who proposed changes to Delaware corporate  law on (or about)  the 40th anniversary of the last major overhaul of the Delaware General Corporation Law in 1967 (although minor updates have been made each year since then.)  Unlike most other jurisdictions, Delaware recognizes practitioners and academics from other states as  being well-versed enough about Delaware law that their opinions are respected in terms of their suggestions for changes in our law. Indeed, the last major revision in 1967 of the DGCL was done under the scholarly direction of University of Virginia Law Professor Ernest Folk.

Here is a post I did recently on the current issue of the Delaware Lawyer magazine which contains articles with many suggested changes by several of the panel members at yesterday’s seminar.

Here is a list of the topics covered at yesterday’s seminar along with the panel members’ names and an overview of the purpose of the seminar.

I am attempting to provide a link to the materials because the volume of topics addressed is too much to cover in a blog post, but among the suggestions I though most notable were those made by Ted Mirvis of the Wachtell Lipton firm in New York, who proposed 2 changes to the DGCL as follows (and I am only paraphrasing):

1. All claims related to the DGCL or regarding fiduciary duties, shall be brought in the Delaware Chancery Court; and

2. Rulings regarding the exercise by directors of their fiduciary duties in change of control cases should be contextual only and should not be the subject of a per se rule.

Professor Faith Stevelman Kahn of New York Law School suggested that for policy reasons, a mandatory forum selection clause would not be advisable–even if permissible by applicable law to do so.  Professor Elizabeth Nowicki of Tulane University Law School argued that Section 102(b)(7) should be "gutted" (my word) in order to give directors a negative incentive (or in her words, "fear of punishment") that would scare them into better observance of their duties.

During a luncheon speech, Vice Chancellor Leo Strine, Jr. provided insights during a 40-minute presentation that I cannot do justice to in the short space appropriate to this forum, but one nugget I wrote down in my notes (and this is only a paraphrase that runs the risk of being taken out of context), is his suggestion that even though Congress has the authority to increase their regulation of corporate governance, they should not engage in "selective intervention" into the corporate governance arena while still leaving the hard work to the states of enforcing fiduciary duties on a case-by-case basis.

Many other luminaries offered suggestions about how to change the DGCL to keep up with the global competition in the 21st Century, and I hope to add more details about the symposium later.