The Supreme Court has denied certiorari in Delaware Coalition for Open Government v. Strine, in which the Third Circuit struck down Delaware’s scheme allowing parties with cases before the Delaware Court of Chancery to pay an extra fee to have their matters heard by a Chancery judge sitting in the guise of an arbitrator.

The Third Circuit’s decision was based on the First Amendment right of public access to judicial proceedings. As I discussed in a previous post on the case, however, in my view the more important principle is that all litigants have access to the same justice at the same price. The chancery arbitration scheme would have allowed wealthy corporate litigants to buy a fast-tracked and private adjudicative process–before sitting state court judges–denied to those who could not afford the five-figure fees required. The denial of certiorari puts a welcome end to a misguided judicial experiment.