IN THE COURT OF CHANCERY OF THE STATE OF DELAWARE IN RE HAPPY CHILD WORLD, INC. ) CONSOLIDATED ) C.A. No. 3402-VCS MEMORANDUM OPINION Date Submitted: June 15, 2020 Date Decided: September 29, 2020 George H. Seitz, III, Esquire and James S. Green, Sr., Esquire of Seitz, Van Ogtrop & Green, P.A., Wilmington, Delaware, Attorneys for Boraam Tanyous and Happy Child World, Inc. Jeffrey S. Goddess, Esquire of Cooch and Taylor, P.A., Wilmington, Delaware, Attorney for Medhat Banoub and Mariam Banoub. SLIGHTS, Vice Chancellor “Perhaps the broadest and most accepted idea [in our adversarial system of justice] is that the person who seeks court action should justify the request, which means that the plaintiffs bear the burdens on the elements in their claims.”1 Deeply enmeshed in the fabric of our jury trial courts, this bedrock principle of our adversarial legal system is, it seems, sometimes overlooked by parties litigating in this court of equity where matters are tried to the Bench. This is especially so when parties come to the court charged with emotions, such as when former friends accuse each other of dishonesty leading to fractured relationships, both personal and professional. In such instances, supplication often takes the place of proof. The parties beseech the court to view the facts as they see them—as they lived them— whether supported by evidence or not. But that is not how trials work. Factual proof, not fervent pleas for justice, is what drives trial outcomes. Yet trials, by their nature, are imperfect. “[I]n a judicial proceeding in which there is a dispute about the facts of some earlier event, the factfinder cannot acquire unassailably accurate knowledge of what happened. Instead, all the factfinder can 1 C. Mueller & L. Kirkpatrick, Evidence § 3.1 (3d ed. 2003). Stated another way, “[t]he reus has no duty of satisfying [t]he court; it may be doubtful, indeed extremely doubtful, whether he be not legally in the wrong and his adversary legally in the right, and yet he may gain and his adversary lose, simply because the inertia of the court has not been overcome, or, to use the more familiar figure, because the actor has not carried his case beyond the equilibrium of proof, or, as the case may be, of all reasonable doubt. Whatever the standard be, it is always the actor and never the reus who has to carry his proof to the required height; for, truly speaking, it is only the actor that has any duty of proving at all.” James B. Thayer, The Burden of Proof, 4 HARV. L. REV. 45, 58 (1890). 1 acquire is a belief of what probably happened.”2 This is especially so when the factfinder must parse through testimony of witnesses attempting to recollect events that occurred more than a decade before trial, and when the parties to the litigation made no effort to document their activities or interactions in real time. Such is the case here. This post-trial decision resolves a decade-old dispute between former friends, Boraam ...
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