Dante Cracogna, Antonio Fici, and Hagen Henrÿ (Eds.): International Handbook of Cooperative Law

The interesting volume by Cracogna, Fici and Henrÿ offers much more than the reader can normally expect from a Handbook. In addition to the very useful presentation of thirty-one national legislations on cooperatives (based on a predetermined model that facilitates the comparison), the Handbook offers an exhaustive comparative essay about the different “Cooperative law” systems and a deep analysis of the supranational legislation that Europe, South America and Africa follow in order to provide, through different technical solutions, uniform regulatory models to national legislators. As the right frame of a valuable painting highlights and does not overshadow the work of art, in the same way the first two hundred pages of the International Handbook accurately introduce the analysis of the national legislations while also creating a solid foundation for the following normative data collection without reducing its importance. The following six hundred pages dedicated to the analysis of thirty-one national cooperative laws offer a large number of ideas and solutions useful for every future study of the topic. The overview offered to the reader, whether he is an economic operator or a scholar in law, is not as heterogeneous as one would expect coming from such different experiences in the cultural and normative traditions. This is a tangible proof of the positive effects of the normative harmonization led by the supranational organizations and also of the existence of cooperative “natural” rules which are identically adopted everywhere. Therefore, the differences and peculiarities of the normative solutions adopted mainly catch the attention of those who are used to managing the typical problems of the cooperative companies.