Page 18 - Delaware Lawyer - Issue 3 - 2024

FEATURE
Ben Lucy
Drive-Through
Critic
Hal Weitzman’s
Take on Delaware
Is Entertaining
But Facile
A flyover critic is a pundit who calls the Midwest flyover country and
publishes flyover criticism: breezy takes on places where the critic has
never lived or worked that confirm the preconceptions of readers who
will never live nor work there.
Given its small size, Delaware doesn’t
attract flyover critics. But with I-95
cutting through the state, it does
attract drive-through critics.
Take congenital explainer Jonathan
Chait. After experiencing a traffic jam on
I-95, Chait noted that Delaware funds
some of its highway expenses with tolls.
Going big, Chait claimed that the tolls
“epitomize the state’s entire ethos” —
namely, “to subsidize its people at the rest
of the country’s expense.”1 Chait then
pointed to what he called “Delaware’s
biggest scam,” offering corporations the
“most pro-management” laws and “lax-
est possible standards of disclosure, share-
holder rights, and fiduciary responsibil-
ity.”2 Having suffered the inconvenience
of a traffic jam, Chait leapt to the drive-
through critic’s seemingly inevitable con-
clusion: Delaware is bad.
Delaware’s latest drive-through critic
is Hal Weitzman, who closed out the
pandemic with his 2022 book, What’s
the Matter with Delaware? How the First
State Has Favored the Rich, Power-
ful, and Criminal—and How It Costs
Us All. Weitzman stands firmly in the
JASON MINTO
16 DELAWARE LAWYER ISSUE 3 2024