US Corporate Law: Part IV: Shareholder rights + Investor rights + Employee rights

While the board of directors is generally conferred the power to manage the day-to-day affairs of a corporation, either by the statute, or by the articles of incorporation, this is always subject to limits, including the rights that shareholders have. For example, the Delaware General Corporation Law §141(a) says the "business and affairs of every corporation ... shall be managed by or under the direction of a board of directors, except as may be otherwise provided in this chapter or in its certificate of incorporation." However, directors themselves are ultimately accountable to the general meeting through the vote. Invariably, shareholders hold the voting rights, though the extent to which these are useful can be conditioned by the constitution. The DGCL §141(k) gives an option to corporations to have a unitary board that can be removed by a majority of members "without cause" (for example, a reason determined by the general meeting and not by a court), which reflects the old default common law position. However, Delaware corporations may also opt for a classified board of directors (for example, where only a third of directors come up for election each year) where directors can only be removed "with cause" scrutinized by the courts. More corporations have classified boards after initial public offerings than a few years after going public, because institutional investors typically seek to change the corporation's rules to make directors more accountable. In principle, shareholders in Delaware corporations can make appointments to the board through a majority vote, and can also act to expand the size of the board and elect new directors with a majority. However, directors themselves will often control which candidates can be nominated to be appointed to the board. Under the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010, §971 empowered the Securities and Exchange Commission to write a new SEC Rule 14a-11 that would allow shareholders to propose nominations for board candidates. The Act required the SEC to evaluate the economic effects of any rules it wrote, however when it did, the Business Roundtable challenged this in court. In Business Roundtable v SEC, Ginsburg J in the DC Circuit Court of Appeals went as far to say that the SEC had "acted arbitrarily and capriciously" in its rulemaking. After this, the Securities and Exchange Commission failed to challenge the decision, and abandoned drafting new rules. This means that in many corporations, directors continue to have a monopoly on nominating future directors.