Okay it'll take me a while to get thru VC Laster's nearly 200 page Columbia Pipeline opinion, but I'll highlight here that in a prior appraisal action, the court found that the deal price was equal to fair value. Now, in the fiduciary action -
https://courts.delaware.gov/Opinions/Download.aspx?id=349400
he's awarding damages on an aiding and abetting claim.

Just skimming quickly, he distinguishes between a sales process claim and a disclosure claim, with the latter being a pure offense to SH's voting rights. He finds the offense to voting rights alone is worth between 50 cents and $1 per share.

Which begs the question whether that analysis will also apply outside the sales context, like, when shareholders are asked to vote on a share issuance for the purpose of making an acquisition.

In the past, Delaware courts have held damages from breach of disclosure obligations in that context are somewhat unquantifiable:
https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/business_law/2023/06/what-a-week-yesterday-was.html
Business Law Prof Blog: What a Week Yesterday Was

In blogging, it’s feast or famine. Some weeks I strain to find something to say; other times I’m spoiled for choice. This week, we kick off with the Supreme Court’s decision in Slack v. Pirani, which Ben Edwards flagged in...

Will this change that? I don't know because I'm only skimming and the opinion is nearly 200 pages but I guess I know what I'm blogging at some point.
So I'm continuing to slowly read this Columbia Pipeline opinion, and I guess what strikes me is how aiding and abetting a breach works here. I'm not really up on the law in this area, but what's going on is a contractual counterparty - TransCanada - is taking advantage of the weaknesses of the other side, and this counts as ... a breach of duty rather than sharp dealing:

Like, this isn't a situation where a counterparty bribed an officer, or something, to get a deal done; here, TransCanada just cultivated the goodwill of the people it was dealing with and took advantage of their preexisting self interest and naivete.

The line between A&A and simply sharp dealing is not clear to me.

To put it another way, TransCanada did not create the situation that resulted in the fiduciaries' self interest; it's not even obvious TransCanada fully understood what it was. It simply took advantage of their eagerness to get a better deal.

To call that aiding a breach is ... well, seems odd to me, but again, I'm not up on the precedent.

Okay but if this is true, shouldn't we examine litigation-limiting bylaws/charter provisions, and their invocation in a particular case, using enhanced scrutiny?
Just as I think this through, if we really believed Laster's logic, we'd say that a litigation-limiting bylaw (forum selection etc) is subject to enhanced scrutiny unless under Corwin it is approved by shareholders. Which would be nice, actually -to put some procedural protections in place
Just going back to this issue of whether TransCanada aided and abetted a breach - suppose the officers/directors simply violated their duty of care, because they were sloppy and didn't read paperwork or something? Would TransCanada be aiding and abetting if they leaned on that to get a bargaining advantage?
(Yes, the Twitter meltdown is hilarious but I've still got nearly 100 more pages of this opinion to read)
Okay, so starting on about page 105, VC Laster is undertaking a fairly Herculean project of demonstrating that Delaware's "enhanced scrutiny" is a standard of review employed in a lot of settings with structural conflicts -
Not only the sale context and takeover defenses, but interference with shareholder voting, and even Zapata for special litigation committees. His claim is that functionally these are all the same:
I'm a little distracted right now with the Twitter michegoss but my instinct is the same as the bylaw question about - the issue is not whether these are, in fact, all forms of the same question for structural conflicts, but why we don't apply enhanced scrutiny for other structural conflicts, like demand cases in general, or litigation limiting bylaws, or I'm sure a million other things.
In which a Delaware court admits humans are not rational economic actors (corporate fiduciaries with large stock holdings wanted to secure the highest price for their shares in a merger, but also wanted the change in control benefits and to retire early):
Attention! The word "noobs" has officially been used in an opinion of the Delaware Court of Chancery:
Anyhoo I'm gonna have to do a blog post about this opinion to unpack it, but VC Laster realizes he's stretching to find a counterparty A&A'd a fiduciary breach by sharp dealing, and his justifications are ... contestable, if TransCanada wants to appeal.
@annmlipton and not even as a quote? Wow.
@annmlipton In retrospect, letting Millennials become judges may have been a mistake.
@annmlipton man, they totally pwned those n00bs.