THE PECOL PROJECT AND ITS CONTEXT

Publishing sets of European law principles has become almost commonplace in the past twenty years, with each new set reflecting a different and new area of European private or commercial law. Thus, it is no surprise that a group of European scholars, who generally focus on the law of cooperatives, decided to enter the fray. The Group (defined below) undertook, over a four-year period, the necessary research and made the necessary comparisons to compile just such a set of European principles for their distinct body of law (the‘PECOL Project’). The results of the PECOL Project have thus been published under the less-thanimaginative title‘The Principles of European Cooperative Law’ or ‘the PECOL’ for short. Unlike some other sets of European principles published in recent years, the PECOL can rely on previous principles: the cooperative principles established by cooperators themselves. Th is raises new questions concerning the place and function of the PECOL. But another particularity derives from research on cooperative law, and it has two typical aspects. First, there has been, to date, only scant adequate research in the field of cooperative law, as discussed below. Secondly, to the extent that such research does exist, much of it has been authored by members of cooperatives themselves, or by legal practitioners working with cooperatives, rather than by academic scholars studying this type of entity. These different features give an original flavour to the PECOL compared to other sets of principles recently established. Th is will be explained by the presentation of the project (section 2) and its goals (section 3).

THE PECOL PROJECT

THE GROUP

The PECOL Project brought together a small group of European scholars who had all chosen to focus on the law of cooperatives (the‘Group’) from those EU Member States with the most prominent cooperative traditions (i.e. France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and the UK), as well as one Member State that had developed its own unique approach to cooperatives (Finland).