After reading your comment, I did a little searching and found a great essay on the shareholder primacy standard in Delaware: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/paper

After reading your comment, I did a little searching and found a great essay on the shareholder primacy standard in Delaware: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2916960 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2916960 Contrary to what a lot of other commenters are saying, the shareholder primacy rule is relatively recent (basically since the 80s), and before that there was broad recognition that corporate boards could balance the interests of various stakeholders. This essay also argues that Dodge v Ford Motor (which was in the Michigan Supreme Court) actually had little practical impact - it was cases like Unocal and Revlon in the Delaware courts that had a much bigger impact on actual board behavior in the US.