The Shareholder Value Myth

CONCLUSION“Slaves of Some Defunct Economist”

In the 1933 Supreme Court case of Liggett v. Lee, Justice Louis Brandeis famously called the public corporation a “Frankenstein monster which states have created by their corporation laws.”¹⁴⁴ Brandeis was dissenting in Liggett, but his observations about the nature of corporations were right on the mark. In creating the legal institution known as the public corporation, state legislatures breathed life into immensely powerful and long-lived entities that interact with human beings on equal legal footing. The corporate whole is much more than the sum of the biological organisms who act as its directors, executives, and employees. It owns property, accumulates wealth, enters contracts, sues and is sued, ...