5 - Commentary on Merriam v. Demoulas Super Mkts.

Summary

Sunita Malepati’s commentary describes how number of minority shareholders brought suit against a family-owned supermarket, Market Basket, with a history of treating employees and other stakeholders well. A group of minority shareholders had offered to sell their shares to a third party, and CEO Arthur T. Demoulas resisted, arguing that the shareholders could not sell their stock if it would imperil the corporation’s tax status. The original opinion found that the shareholders could sell their shares to whom they pleased, regardless of how it might impact the corporation. The feminist judgment rejects the original opinion, applying a feminist ethic-of-care lens and embracing a feminist-informed stakeholder theory of corporate governance. Rather than replicating the shareholder primacy model’s privileging of shareholder-owners, the feminist judgment vindicates the interests of the corporation’s employee-stakeholders and community the corporation serves—each ethnically and socioeconomically diverse groups.