Zapata Corp. v. Maldonado’s Empirical Analysis
1981
Citation profile
32 federal appellate · 16 district · 130 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 240 later decisions (1 by the Supreme Court) — most recently October 2025 · most notably Kamen v. Kemper Financial Services, Inc. (1991), Aronson v. Lewis (1984)
32 federal appellate · 16 district · 130 state decisions — followed in 27 states
Later decisions citing this case, by decade. The current decade is in progress, and our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so the latest bars are undercounted — not a real decline.
Relationships
Relies on Burks v. Lasker · Lewis v. United States · Wilson v. Omaha Indian Tribe · Auerbach v. Bennett · United Copper Securities Company v. Amalgamated Copper Company
Most-quoted passages
The sentences later courts lift from this opinion, ranked by how many decisions quote each — the parts of the opinion doing the work. These counts are smaller than the citation total above because most of the 240 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“special consideration to matters of law and public policy in addition to the corporation's best interests.”
23 later decisions quote this exact passage“[A] stockholder may sue in equity in his derivative right to assert a cause of action in behalf of the corporation without prior demand upon the directors to sue, when it is apparent that a demand would be futile, that the officers are under an influence that sterilizes discretion and could not be proper persons to conduct the litigation.”
10 later decisions quote this exact passage“[Circumstances may arise when continuation of the litigation would not be in the corporation’s best interests. Our inquiry is whether, under such circumstances, there is a permissible procedure ... by which a corporation can rid itself of detri mental litigation. If there is not, a single shareholder in an extreme case might control the destiny of the entire corporation .... “To allow one shareholder to incapacitate an entire board of directors merely by leveling charges against them gives too much leverage to dissident shareholders.” But, when examining the means, including the committee mechanism examined in this case, potentials for abuse must be recognized. If, on the one hand, corporations can consistently wrest bona fide derivative actions away from well-meaning derivative plaintiffs through the use of the committee mechanism, the derivative suit will lose much, if not all, of its generally-recognized effectiveness as an intra-corporate means of policing boards of directors. If, on the other hand, corporations are unable to rid themselves of meritless or harmful litigation and strike suits, the derivative action, created to benefit the corporation, will produce the opposite, unintended result. It thus appears desirable to us to find a balancing point where bona fide stockholder power to bring corporate causes of action cannot be unfairly trampled on by the board of directors, but the corporation can rid itself of detrimental litigation.”
5 later decisions quote this exact passage
How this case has been treated — in progress
Whether each later court followed, distinguished, criticized, or overruled this decision. The treatment classification (task #35) runs highest-cited cases first and lights up here as it reaches this one.