We cover the Delaware Chancery Court all the time over on DealLawyers.com, but we don’t feature its decisions very often on this blog. I’m making an exception today though, because although the Chancery Court didn’t issue any groundbreaking corporate law decisions last week, it did issue a pair of opinions that I can’t resist mentioning here.

The first, Renovaro v. Grumrucku, involved fraud claims arising out of a merger. Cases involving fraud allegations are never pretty, but as the first paragraph of Vice Chancellor Zurn’s opinion demonstrates, this one took a particularly dark turn:

Serhat Gumrukcu was in a bind. He was about to close a transaction in which he would sell lies, about himself and medical advancements he had purportedly developed, for millions of dollars. But Greg Davis, who Gumrukcu had defrauded in a previous scheme, was threatening to go to the authorities. Gumrukcu was afraid that would jeopardize the sale. He had Davis killed.

It’s not often that you see a Chancery Court opinion turn into a script for a Coen Bros. movie in less than a paragraph, but there you have it. Although on second thought, maybe I should’ve said a script for a Roman Polanski movie, because Bloomberg’s Mike Leonard won the Internet when he posted an excerpt from the case on LinkedIn accompanied by the following one-sentence intro:

Forget it Jake, it’s Chancery.

On Friday, Vice Chancellor David issued her opinion in Callahan v. Nelson, a less dark but no less compelling case involving a couple who purchased a trendydoodle goldendoodle named Tucker and have engaged in a multi-year custody battle over the pup ever since they parted company.  That dispute ended up in Chancery Court, and Vice Chancellor David’s 17-page opinion kicks off with a quote from Rudyard Kipling’s “The Power of a Dog” & includes a footnote finding that “it is undisputed that Tucker is a very good boy.” Check it out if you’re looking for a distraction today.

You may wonder how a Court that spends the vast majority of its time dealing with complex corporate disputes end up deciding who gets custody of a dog. Well, the short answer is that pets are legally considered property in Delaware, and the Chancery Court has jurisdiction over equitable matters involving property ownership.

After a week like this, I guess the only thing left to say is – Texas and Nevada, the ball’s in your court!

– John Jenkins