Professor Bainbridge...on law, politics, religion, culture & food

Strine

Vice Chancellor Leo Strine is one of our favorites here at PB.com. Smart, engaged, active, able to interact seemingly effortlessly with both academics and practitioners. The Deal recently gave him a glowing write up.

Strine has become the court’s leading voice. He writes long opinions in a distinctive voice in which he treats not just the issue before him but related subjects in his state’s law. The references to popular music and culture that he works into his writings suggest a breadth of interests, as does the presence of an old paperback copy of Joe McGinniss’ “The Selling of the President,” an account of Richard Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign, near a corporate finance textbook on a bookshelf in Strine’s office. The judge has also written 19 law review articles in his time on the bench.

Strine has astutely managed his career, from volunteering as a teenager for Carper’s first congressional campaign to becoming a significant force in American corporate governance as a judge, but it is a career not without its tensions between jurisprudence and politics, business law and a wider world of ideas. His skill along with his relative youth and his political connections has led to talk that he might move to a bigger stage if Barack Obama and his running mate, Delaware Sen. Joe Biden, capture the White House in November. Few of the lawyers who follow Chancery believe he will spend the rest of his career there, but there’s no consensus on what his next move might be. Strine himself offers few clues.

Senator? SCOTUS?

“A Chesapeake v. Shore pours out of you like a clear mountain stream,” Strine says. “I had been thinking a lot as I decided the cases that came up about these various standards of review and seeing some of the frictions and the overlap.” Chesapeake raised precisely those questions, he continues. “The core parts of the standard of review flowed from my brain to my fingertips. When I went running, I would think about it, I would outline it in my head. You don’t have cases like that every year, or every third year.”

And flows and flows and flows! Strine opinions have become famous for their length and complexity.

“To the extent that I’m a Democrat, I would say that I’m a Franklin Roosevelt, Adolph Berle Democrat about the economy,” he says. “I believe that one of the great triumphs of the West was Western Europe’s and Japan’s and our coming up with a form of capitalism that worked for everyone. When I’m not deciding a particular case, I do have concerns about environmental standards, about the future employment of Americans, if the solution is to export jobs to places with no labor concerns.”

What’s that line about if a man is not a liberal when he’s young he has no heart and if he’s not a conservative when grows old he has no mind? Leo’s got both, so perhaps he’ll end up on the right side eventually.