A Distinct 'Social Enterprise' Law in the UK: The Case of the 'CIC'

Abstract

This article provides a sketch of the community interest company in the UK. Conceived of as a means of empowering social entrepreneurs to adopt a legal framework tailored to their requirements, the community interest company has grown to become an established part of the UK statutory architecture that recognises and controls organisational law. The purpose of this piece is to address whether the statutory provisions regulating such entities amount to something which can be conceptualised as producing a separate social enterprise law; separate in the sense of being autonomous from UK commercial or company law. To the extent that the case has been made that a separate UK social enterprise law does indeed exist, the article goes on to probe whether such an independent and self-contained layer of regulation is a desirable development from a practical and theoretical perspective, and if so, why.