Law Commons^™

Stockholders, Stakeholders, And Bagholders (Or How Investor Diversification Affects Fiduciary Duty), Richard A. Booth Marbury Research Professor Of Law

Faculty Scholarship

The traditional wisdom is that management should serve the interests of the corporation and the stockholders who own it by maximizing stockholder wealth. But a significant number of legal scholars argue that management duty should be more broadly construed to include other constituencies ("stakeholders"), such as employees, creditors, customers, suppliers, and the community at large. The broader view of management duty means that management has more discretion and that stockholders will seldom have recourse if management fails to maximize profits. Nevertheless, many states have adopted so-called other constituency statutes permitting management to consider such other interests. The difference between the …