Page 10 - Delaware Lawyer - Summer 2023

FEATURE | THE SUPERIOR COURT
Jurisdiction
• Abatement
• Auto arbitration appeal
• Breach of contract
• Class actions
• Complex commercial litigation
• Condemnation
• Declarator y judgment
• Defamation (think Dominion
• Foreign and domestic attach-
And then there is the Court’s ap- pellate jurisdiction. The Court serves as an intermediate appellate court, hearing appeals from the Court of Common Pleas, Family Court (adult criminal), and more than 50 adminis- trative agencies.
By The Numbers: FY2023
In FY2023, the Court had over 10,000 civil filings and over 5,000 criminal filings.12 That is over 2,000 more than FY2022. We held 41 civil trials: 29 jury trials and 12 bench. And on the criminal side, we held 129 trials: 121 jury trials and eight bench.
Thank goodness for alternative dispute resolution (ADR). What would we do without it? As Justice Sandra Day O’Connor said: “The courts of this country should not be the places where the resolution of disputes begins. They should be the places where the disputes end af- ter alternative methods of resolving disputes have been considered and tried.”
We have 111,759 pending civil cases and 1,897 pending criminal cases. Let me just say that it is a very good thing that we have manda- tory ADR in civil cases and a cadre of highly skilled, experienced, and effective mediators and arbitrators in the Delaware Bar. One of those mediators, well known to the bench, Superior Court trial litigators, and beyond, Yvonne Takvorian Saville, mediated over 3,400 of the Superior Court’s cases during COVID-19,13 and settled over 90% of them — an extraordinary achievement. Her ef- forts, and those of our other ADR practitioners, greatly reduced what was sure to be a massive backlog and ensured that litigants had a neutral, fair, and efficient process to resolve their disputes in a timely fashion, notwithstanding a global pandemic.
Over the last 25 years, the al-
ready broad jurisdiction that comes
with being Delaware’s court of gen-
eral jurisdiction has been expanded.
As examples, the General Assembly
passed the “Lethal Violence Protec-
tive Order” (LVPO)9 and the “Beau
Biden Gun Violence Protection Act”
(GVPA)10 in 2018 and the “Victims
of Sexual Violence Protective Or-
der” (SVPO)11 in 2023. Among other ment
things, all three laws grant the Supe- rior Court the jurisdiction to order an individual to temporarily relinquish his or her firearms for the purpose of protecting the health and safety of themselves or others.
In addition to the above matters and the Court’s criminal jurisdiction, the Court handles a wide array of civ- il matters (the list is not exhaustive):
• Foreign judgments
• Involuntar y commitments
• Interpleader
• Malpractice
• Mass torts involving pharmaceuti-
cals, medical devices, asbestos, etc. • Personal injur y
• Products liability
• Property damage
• Replevin
8 DELAWARE LAWYER SUMMER 2023
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