Following graduation from the University of Pennsylvania Law School and service in the offices of Ward & Gray in Wilmington, Layton was admitted to the Delaware bar in 1903.
Two weeks after the expiration of the second term of James Pennewill, the previous Chief Justice, Governor C. Douglass Buck announced the appointment of Daniel J. Layton to replace him.
Having been elected attorney general the previous November and having served in office for only six months, Layton resigned from that position to become chief justice.
Governor Buck reappointed Josiah O. Wolcott as chancellor, as well as William Watson Harrington and Charles S. Richards as associate justices of the Supreme Court.
It was notable in its deviation from the 200 year precedent from Keech v. Sandford that a fiduciary should leave open no possibility of conflict of interest between his private dealings and the job he is entrusted to do.
Another of Layton's landmark decisions was Bovay v. H.M. Byllesby & Co. in 1944, which reversed the chancellor's previous dismissal of a suit for an accounting and finding the complaint to state a claim for fraud and unfair dealing against corporate officers and directors for breach of trust, not "mere torts."
In January 1946 Governor Bacon nominated Vice-Chancellor George Burton Pearson, Jr. to fill the vacancy on the Supreme Court created by the expiration of Judge Rodney's term of office.
It is the judicial work product of luminaries like Curtis, Wolcott and Layton that provided the enduring legal and moral basis for much of what is right with the body of Delaware decisional law.