Smith v. Van Gorkom’s Empirical Analysis
1985
Citation profile
27 federal appellate · 17 district · 137 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 261 later decisions — most recently May 2019 · most notably Brehm v. Eisner (2000), Revlon, Inc. v. MacAndrews & Forbes Holdings, Inc. (1986)
27 federal appellate · 17 district · 137 state decisions — followed in 16 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 Interstate Circuit, Inc. v. United States · Aronson v. Lewis · Electronic Specialty Co. v. International Controls Corp. · Donovan v. Cunningham · Zapata Corp. v. Maldonado
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 261 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“[t]he standard for determining whether a business judgment reached by a board of directors was an informed one is gross negligence.”
7 later decisions quote this exact passage“[Fulfillment of the fiduciary function requires more than the mere absence of bad faith or fraud. Representation of the financial interest of others imposes on a director an affirmative duty to protect those interests and to proceed with a critical eye in assessing information____”
3 later decisions quote this exact passage“'all material information reasonably available to them.'”
3 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.