The page's footnoted authorities are catalogued below by source family. Statute citations link to the official state-legislature compilation; case citations link to the issuing court (where available) or Justia / CourtListener mirrors; academic citations link to SSRN, DOI, the publishing law review, or the author's institutional repository. Practitioner commentary appears in the footnotes only as commentary, never as a primary-source URL target, consistent with the SMU CGI primary-sources-only standing rule.
Statutes
- Del. Code Ann. tit. 8, § 101(b) (Delaware corporate purposes), delcode.delaware.gov.
- Del. Code Ann. tit. 8, § 141(a) (board authority), delcode.delaware.gov.
- Del. Code Ann. tit. 8, §§ 361–368 (public benefit corporation subchapter), delcode.delaware.gov.
- Tex. Bus. Org. Code Ann. §§ 21.951–.959 (Texas for-profit benefit corporation), statutes.capitol.texas.gov.
- 15 Pa. Cons. Stat. § 1715 (Pennsylvania constituency statute), legis.state.pa.us (1988 enabling act); current text at 15 Pa. Cons. Stat. ch. 17.
Cases
- Dodge v. Ford Motor Co., 204 Mich. 459, 170 N.W. 668 (1919), CourtListener (Free Law Project).
- A.P. Smith Mfg. Co. v. Barlow, 98 A.2d 581 (N.J. 1953), appeal dismissed, 346 U.S. 861 (1953), Justia.
- Shlensky v. Wrigley, 237 N.E.2d 776 (Ill. App. Ct. 1968), Justia.
- Revlon, Inc. v. MacAndrews & Forbes Holdings, Inc., 506 A.2d 173 (Del. 1986), Justia.
- eBay Domestic Holdings, Inc. v. Newmark, 16 A.3d 1 (Del. Ch. 2010), Justia.
Scholarship and institutional statements
- Adolf A. Berle, Jr., Corporate Powers as Powers in Trust, 44 Harv. L. Rev. 1049 (1931), JSTOR.
- E. Merrick Dodd, Jr., For Whom Are Corporate Managers Trustees?, 45 Harv. L. Rev. 1145 (1932), JSTOR.
- Milton Friedman, The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits, N.Y. Times Mag., Sept. 13, 1970, at 32, nytimes.com.
- American Law Institute, Principles of Corporate Governance: Analysis and Recommendations § 2.01 (Am. Law Inst. 1994), ali.org.
- Business Roundtable, Statement on Corporate Governance (Sept. 1997).
- Business Roundtable, Statement on the Purpose of a Corporation (Aug. 19, 2019), opportunity.businessroundtable.org.
- Lucian A. Bebchuk & Roberto Tallarita, The Illusory Promise of Stakeholder Governance, 106 Cornell L. Rev. 91 (2020), SSRN 3544978.
- Lucian A. Bebchuk & Roberto Tallarita, Will Corporations Deliver Value to All Stakeholders?, 75 Vand. L. Rev. 1031 (2022), SSRN 3899421.
- Lynn A. Stout, The Shareholder Value Myth: How Putting Shareholders First Harms Investors, Corporations, and the Public (Berrett-Koehler 2012), publisher.
- Margaret M. Blair & Lynn A. Stout, A Team Production Theory of Corporate Law, 85 Va. L. Rev. 247 (1999), JSTOR.
- Colin Mayer, Prosperity: Better Business Makes the Greater Good (Oxford Univ. Press 2018), global.oup.com.
- Oliver Hart & Luigi Zingales, Companies Should Maximize Shareholder Welfare Not Market Value, 2 J.L. Fin. & Acct. 247 (2017), DOI 10.1561/108.00000022.
- Alex Edmans, Grow the Pie: How Great Companies Deliver Both Purpose and Profit (Cambridge Univ. Press 2020), cambridge.org.
- Stephen M. Bainbridge, Director Primacy: The Means and Ends of Corporate Governance, 97 Nw. U. L. Rev. 547 (2003), SSRN 300860.
- Stephen M. Bainbridge, The Business Judgment Rule as Abstention Doctrine, 57 Vand. L. Rev. 83 (2004), SSRN 429260.
- Stephen M. Bainbridge, The Profit Motive: Defending Shareholder Value Maximization (Cambridge Univ. Press 2023), cambridge.org.
- Leo E. Strine, Jr., Our Continuing Struggle with the Idea That For-Profit Corporations Seek Profit, 47 Wake Forest L. Rev. 135 (2012), SSRN 2576389.
- David G. Yosifon, The Law of Corporate Purpose, 10 Berkeley Bus. L.J. 181 (2014), Santa Clara Law Digital Commons.
- Mark J. Roe, Dodge v. Ford: What Happened and Why?, 74 Vand. L. Rev. 1755 (2021), Vanderbilt Law Review; SSRN 3943559.
- Brett H. McDonnell, Corporate Constituency Statutes and Employee Governance, 30 Wm. Mitchell L. Rev. 1227 (2004), Mitchell Hamline Open Access.
- Anthony Bisconti, Note, The Double Bottom Line: Can Constituency Statutes Protect Socially Responsible Corporations Stuck in Revlon Land?, 42 Loy. L.A. L. Rev. 765 (2009), LMU Digital Commons.
- Frederick H. Alexander, Holly J. Gregory et al., Public Benefit Corporations: Frequently Asked Questions (B Lab / Sidley 2024), benefitcorp.net.
The bottom line, in a sentence
Corporate law does not require directors to ignore stakeholders, and ordinarily lets them consider stakeholders generously. It requires directors of an ordinary for-profit corporation to connect stakeholder considerations to the long-term welfare of the corporation and its stockholders — unless the corporation has affirmatively chosen a legal form, charter provision, or jurisdictional regime that authorizes stakeholder welfare as an independent fiduciary end. The Business Roundtable's 2019 rhetorical commitment did not change that legal architecture, and the empirical follow-through documented in Figure 4 above shows that the signatories did not, themselves, treat the Statement as if it had.
For comprehensive treatment of Texas corporate-law architecture — TBOC § 21.401 board authority, § 21.419 BJR codification, § 21.552 derivative standing, § 21.4161 controller cleansing, and § 2.115 exclusive forum — see Texas Corporate Law (TBOC).
Method · the standing rules behind this page
HOW WE WORK
Four standing rules behind every footnote on this page.
V09 Corporate Purpose is a doctrinal tracker; the rules below govern what does and does not land in the sections above.
RULE 01
Primary sources only
Every URL targets a court opinion server, codified statute, or peer-reviewed law-review repository (Vanderbilt Scholarship, SSRN, JSTOR, HeinOnline). Practitioner blogs appear only as supplemental cross-references, never as the doctrinal anchor.
RULE 02
Quotation discipline
Block-quoted opinion language is pin-cited to the reporter page. Friedman’s 1970 essay is quoted with the “rules of the game” qualifier preserved; Revlon is quoted with the sale-of-control trigger preserved.
RULE 03
Bluebook 21st citation
Reporter cite + parenthetical court & year, with at least one open primary-source link. Short-form discipline where the same source recurs; Id. for immediate succession only.
RULE 04
Version-stamped
Footnote numbering is stable across revisions; every empirical figure (Bebchuk-Tallarita’s 184 signatories; the 33-state constituency count) carries an as-of-date in the corresponding footnote. Last revision: 2026-05-28.