Corporate State taps insider to head top court

As expected in Delaware, which famously has more corporations than people, Gov. Jack Markell today nominated Chancellor Leo E. Strine, Jr. to serve as the eighth Chief Justice of Delaware's Supreme Court, succeeding Myron Steele, who is retiring. The move would put Strine, a 15-year veteran judge and current head of the state's business-friendly Chancery Court, which settles fights among owners of more than half the New York Stock Exchange-listed U.S. companies and more than a million other Delaware-registered businesses, atop the state's senior appeals court.

Strine, a University of Pennsylvania Law School grad (1988), is a former aide to ex-Gov., now U.S. Sen. Thomas R. Carper, R-Del. and a past litigator at the big New York corporate law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meager & Flom, which, like other big New York firms, has a Wilmington office that defends business clients. He's taught courses at Harvard, Penn, Vanderbilt, Duke and UCLA law schools. He's a native of suburban Wilmington.

It's an important job with political implications beyond the state's legal precedents: A Strine predecessor, former Chief Justice Norman Veasey, recently completed a report reviewing campaign contributions to Markell. Veasey was named special prosector after the state's elected attorney general, Beau Biden, son of  U.S. Vice President and ex-U.S. Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., recused himself. Veasey's staff won convictions of three Delaware businessmen guilty of illegal donations to Markell's campaign, and collected evidence that Markell's campaign had solicited at least some illegal donations. But Veasey in his report chose not to prosecute anyone in Markell's campaign, and limited himself to calling for state law reforms -- a decision that has outraged the state's minority Republicans.