Abstract
Foundations were originally conceived in Mediaeval Europe in relation to charitable purposes: they were the first instance of ‘legal persons’, a concept that lies at the basis of Western corporate law. Family foundation evolved in Continental Europe over the centuries in such a way as to perform some of the functions which are typically associated with private express trusts in the English legal tradition. The practice of private foundations has evolved into three models: (i) the ‘classic’ family foundation that was originally codified in Liechtenstein in 1926, (ii) the Dutch foundation or ‘stichting’, and (iii) the common law foundation. Private foundation statutes have been recently enacted in a number of common law jurisdictions as an ingenuous combination of trust law and company law principles.
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