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Family constitutions are relatively new to the law of family companies, although there might have been forerunners in the history of entrepreneur families. The practical importance and the proliferation of family constitutions in German family companies are increasing, along with the discussion of family constitutions in legal literature. This new instrument of family governance is not law driven but business driven, it has been designed by business advisors. Its analysis and classification are still at the very beginning in academic research and practice. Even though family constitutions are generally deemed to be without any legal effect and not legally binding, from a legal point of view, this assumption is at least highly questionable.

A longstanding question of American constitutionalism emerges out of the fact that constitutions demand fidelity. By virtue of what is the American Constitution binding? Zevit contends that many of the explanations of constitutional fidelity offered today fail to reconcile Americans’ submission to a Constitution written and ratified by generations of long ago with their claim (or aspiration) to be self-governing as a People today. Zevit introduces one type of explanation (the aptness explanation) that does not contain this flaw, and, drawing on an expansive definition of culture as a notion that encompasses the legal-political, offers the concepts of legal-political culture and baseline community as a framework for assessing the Constitution’s aptness while maintaining the People’s self-rule. She argues that constitutional aptness secures the foundations of constitutional legitimacy.

This chapter focuses on the ideas and proposals of the “conference,” i.e., suggestions for future research put forward by the conference participants as a group, working for two days on this subject. These research proposals include inter alia: the potential difference between the family constitution in its written form and the constitution in its practiced form; heterogeneity versus standardization of family constitution content (because of some dominating consulting approaches); the effect of national legal frameworks and traditions on the prevalence of the family constitution and its content in different countries; opportunities in large sample quantitative studies.

This chapter presents the current research status of family constitutions from an economics perspective. It locates the family constitution as part of the family and business governance structure of a family firm and the owner family. The typical structure and content of a family constitution are introduced. The chapter focuses on the status of research about family constitutions and provides a structured map for future research. With regard to extant research, it must be stated that the stock of literature is small. The contributions to literature are categorized in surveys; conceptual contributions; survey data; small sample, qualitative, empirical studies; and big sample, quantitative, empirical studies. The latter group includes three studies with a separate family constitution variable. This small number symbolizes that the family constitution still is an under-researched area. Therefore, family constitution research is far away from being able to answer central questions of advice-seeking owner families like, for example, whether a family constitution affects family performance, firm performance, or both; or whether the development process of a family constitutions disposes of an effect on family or firm performance separately from the hypothesized effect of the family constitution document.

This chapter explores the “Constitutional Revolution” of the 1930s, as it played out beyond the walls of the U.S. Supreme Court. It argues that a radically revised historical memory of the Constitution accompanied the ascent New Deal liberalism. Prior core values associated with the Constitution's history, such as federalism and the sanctity of private property, were dramatically downgraded, while the civil liberties embodied in the Bill of Rights dramatically rose. By so redefining their historical memory of the Constitution, Americans could enjoy the active government that most desired while still celebrating the constitutional traditions of individual freedom and limited government.

This chapter examines ways the Spanish Constitution of 1812, also known as the Constitution of Cádiz, has been viewed in historical and constitutional thought. The document is a liberal constitution establishing constitutional rights, a representative government, and a parliamentary monarchy. It influenced ideas of American equality within the Spanish Empire, and its traces are observed in the process of Latin American independence. To these accepted views, one must add that the Constitution was a lost moment in Latin American constitutional development. By the immediate politicization of constitutionalism after 1812, the document marks the beginning of constitutional difficulties in the region.

Popular constitutionalists seek to recover the popular sovereignty foundations of American constitutionalism, bringing the people in as active participants in the constitutional enterprise as they create and refashion the Constitution by “majoritarian and populist mechanisms” (Amar, 1995, p. 89). The result is to recover an understanding, in FDR's words, of constitution as a “layman's document, not a lawyer's contract” (Kramer, 2004, p. 207). This understanding has deep roots in American constitutionalism, tracing its lineage back to the founding and, as popular constitutionalists insist, finds powerful expression in the likes of The Federalist and Abraham Lincoln (Ackerman, 1991; Tushnet, 1998). In exercising popular sovereignty, the people founded the Constitution, but they did not simply retreat from the trajectory of constitutional development. Rather, as Bruce Ackerman argues, since the Constitution of 1787 the people have spoken in a manner that has re-founded the Constitution giving us a “multiple origins originalism” (Kersch, 2006a, p. 801; see also Amar, 1998 and 2005). In turning to founding era thought and the notion of constitutional foundations, popular constitutionalists like Ackerman and Amar make common cause with conservatives who turn to original intent, but then they seek to synthesize this understanding with democratic expressions of popular will by emphasizing both formal and informal constitutional change, giving us layered “foundings,” and a more complex version of “living constitutionalism.” Such constitutional change, however, can only legitimately come from an authentic expression of “We the People.”

The modern family constitution is a written declaration summarizing a process of agreement and decision-making within an entrepreneurial family regarding the motives, guidelines, and regulations for the family members’ cooperation within the family and the family business association. This chapter exposes facets of family constitutions from a historical and a practical point of view. In order to do so, it begins with a review of the predecessors and origins of family constitutions. Subsequently, focusing especially on the interplay between a family constitution and the family business’ binding legal agreements, it describes four forms of family constitutions that have evolved from different consulting approaches in practice. The chapter concludes with some legal implications.