How to Find and Cite Delaware Law

Trial by jury shall be as heretofore. Those six words are the whole of Article I, section 4 of Delaware's constitution, and heretofore is the one doing the work. The jury right is pinned to whatever it already was, a court of equity never had one, and so the court that hears the internal affairs of most big American companies decides them with no jury in the room.

That court is the Court of Chancery, and it goes back to 1792. A Chancellor and several Vice Chancellors run it. Article IV, section 10 says each of them "shall sit alone" in that court, so you get one judge, no panel, no jury box. Its equity jurisdiction is measured against the jurisdiction the High Court of Chancery of Great Britain had before the colonies broke away. When a real jury question does come up, 10 Del. C. § 369 lets Chancery hand that issue to the Superior Court to be tried at its bar instead.

Why a small state's code lands on your desk

Delaware's General Corporation Law is Title 8, Chapter 1 of the Delaware Code. Most arguments about what a board could or could not do are arguments about a section in there. 8 Del. C. § 141(a) is the one saying a corporation's business and affairs are managed by or under the direction of the board. § 141(e) protects a director who relied in good faith on company records and on reports from people with the right expertise. § 262 carries appraisal rights.

So someone with no Delaware matter at all still reads Delaware statutes. Which makes the next part matter more than it should.

The cite form you were taught is the wrong one

The Delaware courts publish their own citation manual, and it says plainly that the national style guide gets Delaware statutes wrong. The manual's own example: the guide asks for Del. Code Ann. tit. 8, § 141(e) (2007), while most Delaware lawyers and judges write 8 Del. C. § 141(e).

Title number first. Then Del. C. Then the section. No date for current law. You add a date only when you are comparing versions or pointing at one that has since changed.

Case cites run the opposite direction. The Court of Chancery's rules call for reported Delaware cases in the old Delaware style, where the court abbreviation sits before the reporter rather than inside the closing parenthesis. The courts' manual prints this example:

Melson v. Allman, Del. Supr., 244 A.2d 85 (1968).

Del. Supr. for the Supreme Court, Del. Super. for Superior, Del. Ch. for Chancery. The same manual admits few practitioners actually follow the old style and that Chancery itself often does not, so you will see both forms in one brief. Treat them as one address wearing two outfits.

Who publishes it

Statutes and regulations both come out of the legislature's own shop. The Office of the Registrar of Regulations sits inside the Division of Legislative Services, and it is the official repository for every administrative regulation in the state. It puts out the Delaware Register of Regulations on the first day of every month, plus the Administrative Code, plus the online statutory code.

Delaware adopted the Uniform Electronic Legal Material Act in 2014. In practice that means each title of the code, the constitution, the session laws and the Administrative Code are posted as authenticated PDFs next to the HTML. The PDF is the copy carrying the certification.

Two title systems that share numbers and nothing else

This is where Delaware quietly catches people.

The Delaware Code numbers its titles by subject. The Administrative Code numbers its own titles, separately, and they do not line up.

Title 8 of the statutes is Corporations. Title 8 of the Administrative Code is Public Information, meaning the FOIA rules. Corporations in the Administrative Code is Title 20. Title 10 of the statutes is Courts and Judicial Procedure, while Title 10 of the Administrative Code is Charitable Gaming, Lottery, and Fantasy Sports. A few happen to agree, like Title 24 for professions. Most do not.

So when something just says title 8, which book is it in? The number will not tell you. Only the abbreviation next to it will.

A regulation address has three tiers: title, regulation, section. The courts' manual joins the last two with a hyphen, as in 18 Del. Admin. C. § 1501-3.2, which reads title 18, regulation 1501, section 3.2. That hyphen looks like a range and is not one. Meanwhile the Registrar's own site writes the same kind of address as 24 DE Admin. Code 5600. Third spelling, same thing.

Register cites take a volume, then Del. Reg., then a page, then a month and year, as in 9 Del. Reg. 1826 (June 2006). Volumes run July to June, because the Register started in July 1997.

What the corpus actually holds

Counted on 2026-09-18, Delaware comes to 26,578 sections. Statutes account for 22,669 of them. Regulations account for 1,164.

The statute split is 21,394 in force, 1,065 repealed, 207 reserved, 3 expired. Delaware leaves repealed sections numbered and in place, so a cite that resolves to a stub is not a broken cite, it is a dead one. The regulation split is 1,099 in force, 62 repealed, 2 reserved, 1 transferred.

Now look at the court rules: 1,385 sections, of which 1,237 are in force. Delaware holds more court rule text than regulation text. For a state whose most famous institution is a court, that shape makes a kind of sense.

The rest is 843 attorney general opinions, 301 agency guidance documents, and 216 constitution sections, 211 of them in force.

A lookup you can repeat

Somebody hands you "141(e)" with no other context.

1. It is a statute, not a regulation. Delaware regulation addresses have three tiers and a hyphen.
2. Put the title first. 8 Del. C. § 141(e).
3. Open the authenticated PDF for Title 8 rather than reading only the web page.
4. If the document quoting it is old, look for a date parenthetical. Delaware prints one only when the version matters, so its presence is a signal.
5. If you actually wanted the regulation numbered 8, remember that is FOIA, not corporations.

What bites

The old case style. Del. Supr. before the reporter, not Del. after it, whenever Chancery rules govern.

Two title systems sharing numerals. An 8 in a statute cite and an 8 in a regulation cite point at unrelated subjects.

The hyphen inside a regulation number, which is punctuation, not a range.

And 1,065 repealed statute sections still parked at their original numbers, waiting to be quoted by someone who did not check.

Before you put a Delaware section into anything that matters, open the authenticated PDF for that title and read it there. The Registrar publishes both that and the web page, and only one of the two is certified.

Facts used

All Delaware corpus counts below are from Vaquill AI's US primary law data, measured 2026-09-18.

Priyansh Khodiyar

Co-Founder & CTO

Priyansh leads engineering and AI at Vaquill, from the matter workbench to drafting, document comparison, document matrix, and citation-verified research.