Aspects of Law

• Publication year: 1997
• Citation: Vol. 21 No. 02

SEATTLE UNIVERSITY LAW REVIEWVolume 21, No. 3WINTER 1998

A TRIBUTE TO CHANCELLOR WILLIAM T. ALLEN

Aspects of Law

Eric A. Chiappinelli(fn*)

When William T. Allen, Chancellor of the Delaware Court of Chancery, announced his intention not to seek reappointment, the Seattle University Law Review decided to put together a number of articles dealing with Chancellor Allen's contribution over the twelve years he served as a judge.(fn1) At one point early on, this merry melange was going to be a Symposium but, budgets being what they are, we couldn't afford a banquet to speak after. The participants were not going to engage in conversation with one another, so we couldn't really call it a Colloquy, either. Neither did we anticipate giving others the chance to comment on us or on Chancellor Allen, so a Forum was no good.

We are not an organization specializing in the study of Chancellor Allen, so we couldn't call our articles Proceedings or Annals. This is a one-shot deal, so Annual Report is out, let alone the possibility of Jahrbuch.

Not only do we not anticipate future articles on Chancellor Allen, but these articles are not intended to be narrow, incremental contributions to the Alleniana. For those reasons we rejected the title Studies. But neither did we cast our net widely in any sort of systematic way, so that we feel it inappropriate to title this a Survey. It might have become a Festschrift except that no one is celebrating the fact that Chancellor Allen is leaving the bench. We can't call this a Retrospective because the articles don't canvass the Chancellor's judicial career in any programmatic way. Finally, of course, since he's not dead, our consideration of the title In Memoriam was a brief one.

So instead this is a Tribute(fn2) to Chancellor William T. Allen. Each of the articles deals with a different part of the Chancellor's career. Read together they provide a surprisingly consistent view of disparate aspects of one career in law. In that sense, although each article stands alone, together they are aspects of law. Before I describe these aspects, let me introduce Chancellor Allen.

William T. Allen is a native of Philadelphia and was born in 1944.(fn3) He was graduated from NYU in 1969 and received his law degree three years later from the University of Texas. While in law school he served as an Articles Editor of the Texas International Law Journal. Following his graduation from law school, Allen spent two years clerking for a United States District Judge in Wilmington, Delaware and then entered private practice until his appointment to the bench by Governor Castle in 1985. In the twelve years he served as Chancellor (his term expired in June 1997), he wrote more than 450 opinions.(fn4) Lexis reports that slightly over half were in the area of corporate law while just under half...