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The articles in these volumes raise a number of important issues that deserve more elaboration in future scholarship. This postscript touches on three of them. The first is the impact of the financial crisis on the discipline of economics and particularly the tendency of that discipline to proceed with little attention to the research of other social scientists. The second is that the speculative excesses in the financial markets require that we think about structural reforms that would create new routes for capital to be channeled to productive purposes. The third is the question of how people in the United States conceptualize the relationship between the state and the market.

Government secrecy is often portrayed as antithetical to transparency¹ as well as an affront to the general right to know, citizen participation, administrative oversight, and democracy itself.² Furthermore, government secrecy is connected to “much broader questions regarding the structure and performance of democratic systems” (Galnoor, 1977, p. 278), and in instances, is “more dangerous to democracy than the practices they conceal” (Fulbright, 1971).³ This condition has led to what Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. (1987) describes as a secrecy state, whichhas extended the secrecy system far beyond its legitimate bounds. In doing so, the target is far less to prevent the disclosure of information to enemy governments than to prevent the disclosure of information to the American Congress, press and people. For governments have discovered that secrecy is a source of power and an efficient way of covering up the embarrassments, blunders, follies and crimes of the ruling regime. (p. 5)

The popular rejection of the European constitution in France and the Netherlands triggered much debate in and around the European Central Bank (ECB) concerning the long-term viability of the euro. The region of European Monetary Union (EMU) member countries has suffered from economic strains for several years: while Germany has been in a severe economic downturn since 2001, and thus its government has implored the ECB to adopt more stimulatory monetary policy, other countries, such as Ireland and Spain, have been in the midst of an economic boom. With the prospect of a slowdown in the political process of forming a United States of Europe, a number of observers and policy-makers have begun to review the long-term viability of the European currency system. In early June 2005, politicians in Italy even publicly contemplated the possibility of leaving the euro-system and re-introducing their domestic currency, thus enabling Italy to conduct its own monetary policy, suitable for its own policy goals. Meanwhile, policy-makers in a large number of East European and Asian countries continue to favour joining the EMU and adopting the euro at the earliest possible date. Given the most recent events and discussions, and after several years of experience with the euro, it may be a suitable time to reconsider some of the potential benefits and disadvantages for new accession countries to join the euro system in the future.

This chapter provides an introduction to the world of family companies and family constitutions from a legal perspective. It first studies the legal types of business organizations that family firms have chosen across time and jurisdictions. It then illustrates how early predecessors of family constitutions evolved in the late Middle Ages and what modern family constitutions look like in different countries today. Further considerations are devoted to the governance framework of family firms. The chapter concludes by exploring the potential legal effects of family constitutions under German company and contract law.