In the Socialist Federation of the Republics of Yugoslavia (the former Yugoslavia), enterprises were typically socially-owned. These enterprises were the flagship of the famous Yugoslav model of selfmanagement: neither private nor state-owned, they were a collective property controlled by their employees, the "workers." After the break-up of the former Yugoslavia in the early 90s, five successor States (the former Yugoslav republics) inherited the socially-owned enterprises: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, FYR Macedonia, Serbia and Montenegro, and Slovenia. Due to the complex federal organization of some of these States however, the notion of social ownership was in fact inherited by no less than nine distinct legal systems.1 At the time of the writing of this paper, hundreds of enterprises are still socially-owned,2 but the future of this legal form is already settled. In this regard, one would find it difficult to verify the famous Balkanic diversity clichd: the nine responses are in the form of a privatization law. In a context of transition to a market economy, the decision to privatize is banal, and so is, probably, the subsequent convergence towards western corporate forms and governance models. But the socially-owned enterprises are not, for their peculiar legal nature and their mode of governance entail disconcerting legal questions, e.g., what do they own? Who owns them? Can they be privatized without a prior nationalization?