Finnish cooperative legislation dates back to the beginning of the twentieth century. The first Law on Cooperation [Osuustoiminatlaki] was adopted in 1901. The lawmakers of the time thought it of utmost importance to “ … pass legislation on economic associations … as the legal form of stock companies cannot apply to these associations [cooperatives]. ”

The 1901 Law on Cooperation has been replaced three times, in 1955 with the 1954 Law on Cooperatives ([Osuuskuntalaki], 28.5.1954, 247); in 2002 with the 2001 Law on Cooperatives ([Osuuskuntalaki], 28.12.2001/1488); and in 2014 with the current Law on Cooperatives ([Osuuskuntalaki], 14.6.2013/421, henceforth‘the Act’).

The consecutive changes of the cooperative law have related to the substance of the law and to its form.

As regards the substance, the changes introduced with the amendments to the 1954 Law (especially the two major amendments of 1981 and 1989) and with the 2001 law may be summarised as intended to secure the sufficient capitalisation of cooperatives, for reasons of both competitiveness and third party protection and – in order to achieve this – to reduce the legal structural differences between cooperatives and stock companies to the minimum necessary to maintain the distinctive features of cooperatives. According to the Ministry of Justice, the purpose of the current Act is to further improve the competitiveness of cooperatives by facilitating their foundation, their access to financing and their management, while preserving the minimum cooperative standards.

As regards the form, the amendments to the 1954 Law and the subsequent laws, as well as the amendments thereto, introduced as far as was possible the terminology of the Limited Liability Companies Act ([Osakeyhti ö laki 21.7. 2006/62]). Th is terminology is intended to signify neutral legal figures and to allow use of the abundant literature and jurisprudence on stock companies in the quasi absence of literature and court cases on cooperative law. The reliance on material on stock companies is one of the key reasons for the companisation of cooperatives through legislation.

INTRODUCTION

How Italian and French criminology were received elsewhere in Europe diff ered greatly from one country to another. In Germany, the Italian School, and particularly Lombroso, gained a considerable following thanks to the “missionary work” of a number of its protagonists. In the United Kingdom, opinions on the significance of Lombrosian criminology were more divided. This is apparent from the fact that at the beginning of the twentieth century a detailed study was initiated by Charles Goring of the validity of the views proclaimed by Lombroso in the context of that school regarding the born criminal. In Germany, there was no question of any such study. In both countries, hardly any attention was paid to the ideas promulgated in the context of the French School, with Lacassagne and also Tarde and Durkheim being ignored. In neither country did they play any recognisable role in public or academic debate on crime and the criminal justice system.

It is important to note that the development of criminology in Germany in around 1900 cannot be viewed in isolation from its development in the other main German-speaking countries, namely Austria and Switzerland. The developments in these countries are in fact very closely linked and will therefore be discussed in relation to one another. That said, it can also be noted that the development of criminology in these three countries – like its rise in Italy and France – was closely linked to major figures who carried out pioneering work. Those figures were, in particular: Franz von Liszt, a professor of criminal law, who, on his appointment at the University of Marburg in 1882, made an impassioned plea for the integration of criminology into the study of criminal law; Hans Kurella, who around the turn of the century was a tireless advocate of Lombroso and his criminal anthropology; Gustav Aschaff enburg, a psychiatrist who published a book in 1903 – Das Verbrechen und seine Bek a mpfung [Crime and its Repression] – that gave him the same leading role in German-speaking Europe as Lombroso had in Italy and Lacassagne in France; and finally Hans Gross, a magistrate and later professor in Graz, who in the 1890s positioned himself with several large-scale studies as the founder of both modern criminal psychology and modern criminalistics.

DEFINITION AND OBJECT OF COOPERATIVES

PRELIMINARY REMARKS

General Cooperative Law and Special Cooperative Laws

It is difficult to comprehend cooperative French law as a whole because it is a mix of general law and several special laws dealing with specific kinds of cooperatives. The general law is Act 47-1775 of 10 September 1947 known as the’ cooperation statute‘. The purpose of the legislature at that time was to provide a cooperative common law to replace the various previous special laws laid down over a span of fift y years. Indeed, article 30 of the law still states that there will be a codification of cooperative law, and that the 1947 Law will be the first title of the new code. The 1947 Law also contained an original provision regarding normative coordination, since its Article 2 provided that general law would have greater strength than special laws, contrary to the traditional principle specialia generalibus derogant, non generalia specialibus. However, that objective was not achieved, and the provision on codification is still in force. The exceptional solution of article 2 has since been repealed by L. 92-643 of the 13th of July 1992, article 2.1.

The consequence is a large number of special laws of such an extent that it is pointless to enumerate them all. Some of the most important examples are the following:

Banking cooperatives: code mon é taire et financier (C.mon.fin.), art. L.512-1 to L.512-10, precising that, in the chapter dealing with these cooperatives in this Code, each banking cooperative is submitted to different provisions; for example: C.mon.fin., arts. L.512-2 to L.512-13 for‘banques populaires’.

INTRODUCTION

The history of criminology in the United States has so far received little attention from either criminologists or historians. No more or less cohesive, lengthy, or detailed and thorough history has yet been written. There are, of course, all sorts of separate publications in which certain developments or certain episodes are discussed to a greater or lesser degree. There are also editions of sources that are useful for getting an idea of this history. This serious lack of historicalcriminological research is in fact recognised in the United States itself.

This means that it is doubly difficult to deal with the history of criminology in the United States until the 1960s in the framework of an introduction in which one is attempting not only to do justice to the transatlantic dimension in the history of the criminology, but also to explore the interaction between criminology, the criminal law, and the criminal justice system in that country. It is nevertheless very important to attempt to obviate that lack and one-sidedness of the standard European and American introductions to criminology.

In the previous chapters of the present work, attention was repeatedly drawn to the interaction between developments in Europe and the United States as regards the criminal justice system. Until late in the nineteenth century, that interaction mainly involved the design of the prison system. There was, for example, the discussion in Europe in response to the conflicting views in the United States as to whether the Pennsylvania or Auburn system was preferable. Similarly, one should not overlook the conference on penitentiary matters in London in 1872 – organised by Enoch Wines, the head of the New York Prison Association – which was the first in a long series of transatlantic conferences under the auspices of the International Penitentiary Commission.

Moreover, we have already seen that in the first half of the twentieth century European researchers and policymakers cited not only European but also American literature in support of their views and proposals. Until into the 1930s, a few of them even crossed the Atlantic specifically to take an on-the-spot look at certain developments in the United States.

(1) Cooperatives are obligated and entitled to be audited.

(2) The specific aim of cooperative audit is to verify that cooperatives pursue their objectives as defined by the law and their statutes in accordance with section 1.1, and that their structure and activity are consistent with their identity as cooperatives.

(3) Cooperative audit must be conducted by specifically qualified and independent auditors in forms that ensure the autonomy of cooperatives and are consistent with their specific features.

(4) Cooperatives are also obligated and entitled to be financially audited as prescribed by law, according to the nature and scale of their activities, their size, and the need to protect creditors, and other stakeholders in addition to the members and the pursuit of the cooperative objective.

COMMENTARY

Introduction – Overview of Chapter 4

In this chapter, the focus is on audit of cooperative societies as a form of external control supplementing internal audit and member control. Comparing company audit and audit of cooperative societies reveals similarities and differences. As in the case of audit of companies and other commercial enterprises, cooperative audit assesses operational efficiency and economic results, including performance of the management (prudence and care) and compliance with the law. Th is is done in the form of financial audit. Cooperative audit is different from company audit because, besides assessing the operational efficiency of the cooperative enterprise, the auditors must also assess member-oriented effectiveness by means of management audit in addition to financial audit.

The principles of cooperative audit are derived from national laws and regulations governing audit of cooperative societies in seven EU member states: Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Spain and the United Kingdom (UK). In Italy, the Constitution (art. 45) expressly states that the law ensures, through appropriate controls, the character and purposes of cooperatives. Th is includes ensuring respect of their distinct legal nature as laid down in the organisational law and verifying that cooperatives observe the rules on their function (mutual purpose) and structure (democracy, member participation, member control).

INTRODUCTION

It goes almost without saying that aft er the collapse of the Napoleonic empire, discussion arose throughout Western and Central Europe about its institutional legacy in the field of the criminal justice system and the combatting of crime. And given the history of that legacy, it is equally obvious that that discussion was permeated by all kinds of philosophical ideas, religious beliefs, and political theories. Ideas regarding crime and criminals naturally played an important role in this.

This chapter begins by considering the discussion of the prison system. In many countries, the comprehensive reorganisation of that system that gradually took place was more noticeable than the reform of the policing system. In some countries, that restructuring was certainly not unimportant but it was not the subject of public discussion and scholarly polemics to the same extent as reorganisation of the prison system. But that is no reason to ignore the reorganisation of the policing system; it was important from a social perspective and, in particular, it paved the way for an increasing role of the police in how criminals were perceived and in the fight against crime. Reform of the judicial system and of the codified criminal law were generally of less interest than the reorganisation of policing. Relatively speaking, they were to a considerable extent bones of contention within a small political, academic, and professional elite made up of jurists. In this abridged version of the book, they will be left aside.

The focus of the second part of this chapter is on the nascent scientific study of crime and criminals. The decision to deal with the various topics in this order is deliberate. The institutions that were gradually established made it possible to pursue this new science, for example by compiling statistics, but they also required scientific research in order to function in an acceptable manner.

Following on from these considerations, an account will be given of how a number of academic researchers in the mid-nineteenth century attempted to develop a clear picture of crime and its perpetrators. On the one hand, there was someone like Franz Gall who – in the wake of thinkers such as Lavater – adopted a more biological perspective on these issues, while on the other there were statisticians such as Adolphe Quetelet who introduced the sociological study of them.

INTRODUCTION

The history of criminology in the twentieth century is marked very much by its extreme ideologisation in the two totalitarian police states that dominated Europe during that century, namely the Third Reich and the Soviet Union. However, most introductions to criminology, entirely wrongly, have ignored its evolution under those regimes. But to understand how the far-reaching Americanisation of criminology took place in Western Europe aft er the Second World War, one needs to have some understanding of the demise of criminology under those dictatorships.

The demise of the rather successful German criminology was the consequence of its extreme ideologisation during the Third Reich. In particular, its ruin created a vacuum that aft er the Second World War was in many European countries largely filled by the type of criminology that had developed in the meantime through the reception of European criminology in the United States.

The criminology that had developed in Russia, and later in the Soviet Union, obviously could not fulfil that role. This is not only because it was historically not very highly developed, and thus had little or no appeal to scientists in other countries, but also because aft er the Second World War it remained a totally ideologised activity, with the Cold War making it even less attractive for Western researchers than was already the case.

NAZIFICATION OF CRIMINOLOGY IN THE THIRD REICH

During our discussion of the development of criminology in the Weimar Republic, it was pointed out that not only criminology itself but also the criminal justice system – or at least the police and prison system – fell increasingly under the spell of a type of Kriminalbiologie that was indebted to eugenics and that was considered useful in preserving the purity of the (German) race. Our explanation of its development also devoted the required attention to the view of the crux of the crime problem – das Verbrechertum – that had become rooted within the Kriminalpolizei and the views of Heindl on combatting that problem by means of the lifelong internment of dangerous professional criminals.

The present chapter will first consider how, aft er the Nazis’ seizure of power in 1933, high-ranking Nazi police chiefs almost immediately and systematically linked Kriminalbiologie and Kriminalpolizei with one another to decisively shape their party's policy on crime.

INTRODUCTION

The previous chapter explained how in the course of the nineteenth century – in part influenced by the further development of the criminal justice system – authors increasingly wrote about the problems of crime and the combatting of crime, from very diff erent perspectives. In the final two decades of the century, the European literature on these topics increased well-nigh explosively. That enormous growth in the number of publications is not the only diff erence, however, in the way this field of study had developed in the preceding decades. Another important diff erence is that, around the turn of the nineteenth century, this domain increasingly took on the form of a separate scientific discipline, namely criminology. The academic institutionalisation of this field manifested itself, inter alia, in the establishment of specialised journals, the founding of new associations, the organisation of dedicated national and international conferences, the publication of specific primers, and the establishment of special university chairs. The man who provided the decisive impulse for the “scientisation” of criminology was undoubtedly Cesare Lombroso. He is quite rightly considered the founder of the discipline.

It is therefore an obvious step for us to begin by devoting ample attention to the views that Lombroso expressed from 1876 on – when the first edition appeared of his renowned Trattato antropologico sperimentale dell ‘Uomo Delinquente studiato in rapporto all’ antropologia, alla medicina legale e alla discipline carcerarie [Anthropological and Experimental Treatise on the Criminal Man Studied in Relation to Anthropology, Legal Medicine and Prison Science] (usually abbreviated to Uomo delinquente) – about the criminal individual and the struggle that Lombroso waged in order to have these views taken seriously in both the scientific and political worlds. But in his homeland of Italy, Lombroso was not alone, and references were already made at the time to the “Italian”, “Positive”, and also “Anthropological” School of criminology. Lombroso's main associates within that school were the lawyers Enrico Ferri and Raff aele Garofalo. Their work cannot therefore be ignored here, if only to show that the term “school” should not be taken too literally: the opinions of Lombroso, Ferri, and Garofalo in fact diff ered considerably on a number of points.

(1) Cooperatives cooperate among themselves to further their objectives and to support, promote, and develop other cooperatives, cooperation among cooperatives, and the cooperative business model.

(2) The purpose of cooperation is either economic or socio-political or a combination of the two.

(3) Cooperatives cooperate in forms and structures that safeguard their autonomy, are consistent with their specific features, and are guided by the principles of equality, solidarity and subsidiarity.

(4) The law may promote economic and socio-political cooperation among cooperatives as well as with other entities of the social economy.

(5) Cooperatives may not participate in structures of cooperation which prejudice their autonomy and the members‘ultimate control of the cooperative.

COMMENTARY

The Study Group on European Cooperative Law (SGECOL) includes cooperation among cooperatives in its suggested Principles of European Cooperative Law (PECOL), which are otherwise limited to the organisational structure of primary cooperatives. It does so because it sees cooperation among cooperatives as part and parcel of the organisational set-up of cooperatives. The purpose of this Introduction to the Commentary on the respective chapter of the PECOL is to shed light on what‘part and parcel’ may mean in terms of legal principles.

Cooperation among cooperatives as a specific form of inter-enterprise collaboration is an empirical fact. It predates the emergence of modern cooperatives and their subsequent regulation by law-makers in the second half of the nineteenth century. However, there‘is no simple, widely agreed upon formulation of national or even regional structures.’Indeed, national legal systems display two diverse spectra relating to either economic or sociopolitical cooperation, or to both at the same time: on the one hand, a spectrum of permitting, facilitating, actively encouraging and supporting cooperation; on the other, a spectrum of regulations on forms of cooperation, varying in their degree of intensity, scope and permanence, and ranging from total integration (e.g. mergers), via groups of cooperatives and other types of enterprises and networks, to contractual arrangements. Obviously, ways of cooperating‘are the product of history and [hence] the names vary.’

INTRODUCTION

When one compares the development of modern criminology in the Netherlands and Belgium with its evolution in neighbouring countries, it is striking how in the Low Countries that discipline gradually became widely established in universities in the first half of the twentieth century and to some extent also in the criminal justice system. Why it developed in that way is not that easy to say. The fact, for example, that Von Liszt had such major allies, specifically in the Netherlands and Belgium in the persons of Van Hamel and Prins as regards innovation in the area of criminal law, suggests that he perceived a spirit of openness in those two countries that he did not immediately find elsewhere in Europe.

That openness will certainly have promoted the fruitful development of criminology in both countries but it cannot have been the sole cause of that success. Anyone who knows something of what actually happened in the field of criminology and the criminal justice system on both sides of the Belgian – Dutch border between 1880 and 1960 will realise that there are not only great similarities but also significant diff erences. It is highly likely that other factors also played an important role. But in any case, the history of criminology in the one country cannot simply be lumped together with that in the other. 1 In this chapter, the developments in each country will therefore be discussed separately.

A sketch will first be given of the rise of criminology, based on the biobibliography of the main driving forces behind it. Second, we will deal with the controversies that this led to in the scientific, political, and administrative worlds regarding the relationship between the principles of some variants of this new discipline and the foundations of the existing criminal law and criminal justice system. Third, we will discuss how criminology nevertheless had an impact, directly and indirectly, on certain aspects of the redesign of the criminal justice system and, more broadly, on the containment of crime. Fourth, an account will be given of how criminology became successfully established in universities in the 1930s.

DEFINITION AND OBJECTIVES OF COOPERATIVES

INTRODUCTION

In Italian law, the cooperative is a particular type of legal entity – more precisely, a particular type of company with juridical personality – which is subject to a specific set of rules identifying it by a particular aim and structure. Moreover, in Italian law, several‘legal types’ of organisations exist. What characterises and distinguishes a certain legal type is a combination of the entity's purpose and structure, according to the assumption that any organisation is established to achieve a given result in a certain manner.

The entity's purpose is, therefore, one of the most important elements in the classification of the existing organisational types, and Italian law frequently includes the purpose of an organisation in its legal definition. Th is certainly helps to identify and separate the organisational legal types, and makes a systematic interpretation of organisational law easier. Inquiring into the purpose of a legal entity also helps to interpret its regulation, since entities‘regulations should be consistent with their purposes.

The purpose of a legal entity includes both the ultimate objective of the organisation (scopo-fine), and the activity by which the organisation aims at pursuing it (scopo-mezzo). The activity performed may be the element that permits distinction among legal types of entities that pursue the same final objective. In other instances, and cooperatives may be one of them, the activity performed and the entity‘s ultimate objective coincide, in the sense that the activity does not play an instrumental role, but its very performance constitutes the final objective of the organisation. While, for example, for-profit companies conduct business (scopo-mezzo) in order to distribute profits to shareholders (scopo-fine), by conducting business with its members a cooperative may achieve its objectives per se, given that – as we shall see – the mutual purpose that characterises Italian cooperatives consists in running an activity that directly satisfies the interests of the members.

DEFINITION OF COOPERATIVE

The general regulation of Italian cooperatives is set forth in articles 2511–2545 octiesdecies ICC, as amended by Legislative Decree 17 January 2003, no. 6, reforming company law.