In the Matter of Reading Company Appeal of Trailer Train Company’s Empirical Analysis
Citation profile
3 district · 5 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 19 later decisions — most recently May 2025
3 district · 5 state decisions
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 Thompson v. Magnolia Petroleum Co. · Gardner v. State of New Jersey · Baker v. Gold Seal Liquors, Inc. · Cline v. Kaplan · Taubel-Scott-Kitzmiller Co. v. Fox
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 19 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
““[The minority shareholder’s] claim must be judged under the law of Delaware, where [the corporation] is incorporated. . . . Under Delaware law, corporate directors stand in a fiduciary relationship to their corporation and its stockholders. . . . Similarly, a majority shareholder, or a group of shareholders who combine to form a majority, has a fiduciary duty to the corporation and to its minority shareholders if the majority shareholder dominates the board of directors and controls the corporation .... The scope and extent of the fiduciary duty depend upon the circumstances of the challenged action or inaction .... The Delaware courts will ordinarily apply the ‘business judgment’ rule, under which a court will not disturb the judgments of a board of directors ‘if they can be attributed to any rational business purpose.’ . . . [B • • • [B “We must now apply the business judgment rule to [the corporation’s] refusal to pay dividends [] and its continued reinvestment of earnings in new equipment. Each of the challenged policies can be attributed to a rational business purpose. . . . [The corporation], by setting the lowest possible . . . rates, presumably keeps demand for [its services] high. The refusal to pay dividends could help achieve that goal by eliminating the need to raise rates to earn a surplus. The reinvestment of earnings in new equipment assumedly helps [the corporation] meet the . . . needs of its customers. . . . [U]nder the challenged policies [the corporation]”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority“Under Delaware law, corporate directors stand in a fiduciary relationship to their corporation and its stockholders”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
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.