2.3.4 The selection of countries

The application of the comparative legal method requires the examination of every EU legal system, which has regulated the social enterprise concept.1 Accordingly, it entails a comparison of legal rules in 19 of the 28 EU countries, as 19 countries have introduced tailor-made legislation for social enterprises into their national legal systems, or are developing new legislation on this topic. Obviously, due to constraints and limitations, primarily in terms of space and subsequently in terms of personal linguistic competence, it was impossible for us to cover all of the laws of these 19 jurisdictions. Consequently, the research in this article is channelled in such a way that only pre-selected legal systems are evaluated, namely the Belgian, the Greek and the UK jurisdictions, each one being a representative of the three prevalent sub-groups and corresponding legal forms for social enterprises referred to above in Sub-section 2.1.

Additionally, an important criterion that we considered in terms of the selection and eligibility of the legal systems to be compared is whether the concept of social enterprises has reached a certain level of maturity in the legal system, i.e. introduced in a special law.2 Hence, jurisdictions, which are in the process of developing new legislation and legal forms for social enterprises were not selected for the comparative examination, as was the case for Latvia, Luxembourg, Malta and Poland (see Figure 2.1). Finally, the decisive criterion for the selection of the legal systems was our personal competences. In particular, the choice of legal systems to be compared was shaped by our legal and linguistic knowledge and experience.3 Our linguistic knowledge is limited to English, Greek and Dutch/Flemish law and our legal knowledge and experience is mainly limited to Dutch law and Greek law. This means that we were able to appraise the legal provisions and literature regarding the legal systems of Belgium, Greece and the UK, effectively and with confidence.