New in the Czech Civil Code – Rules on Family Enterprise

For more than two decades the family business enterprises of the first generation (generation of founders) are more and more dominating in the category of today’s Small and Medium-sized Enterprises in the Czech Republic. The necessary legal background defining the legal relationships and rights of all participating persons was, however, limited to general provisions in the Commercial Code that hasn’t solved many of the problems associated thereto. Only in 2012 the new Czech Civil Code, Act. No 89/2012 Coll., introduced the institute of family enterprise as completely new term in the Czech Civil law. The present paper aims to analyse the key rules of this new legal regulation, focusing on significant aspects of the institute in the context of commercial law and family law, as well as to highlight the potential weaknesses in the regulation itself.