A Delaware Court of Chancery judge this week ruled that a decades-old divorce settlement did not block Samuel F. duPont from leaving the money from a duPont family trust to his children from a second marriage, in a messy dispute involving the descendants of one of Delaware’s most prominent and wealthy families.
The ruling, from Master Patricia W. Griffin, was only the second in Delaware to directly address an obscure issue of probate law. And it came as a stinging defeat for the three children of duPont’s first marriage, who argued through their Morris, Nichols, Arsht & Tunnell attorneys, that the 1962 agreement between their parents had designated them as the beneficiaries of the trust duPont’s father, Ernest duPont, had established for him in 1936.
