Social enterprises in Europe have been a research subject for some years, so the general social entrepreneurship is considered an important resource to overcome global crisis in producing and distributing income and goods and services for people. In particular, in European landscape social cooperatives and other organizations are institutional form in which usually social enterprises are established, assuming a juridical and a governance ruling system that help them to build and maintain “social capital” and good relations among people, enterprises and institutions. Proposed definitions of social enterprise are focused on economic and social features, but in an unique economic and juridical envronment represented by the EU we need an unique legal framework for corporate governance and benefits allowed to social enterprises to define an European status and avoid opportunistic utilization of different European statuses. Emes definition proposes as economic characteristic of social enterprise an effective economic production, autonomy, a significant economic risk and presence of paid workers. Moreover they say that in a social enterprise the aim is produce benefit for the community and disadvantaged people, the governance is collective and not only entrepreneurial and stakeholders (not only shareholders) manage the firms with a wider decisional process, excluding or limiting profit distribution, during and at the end of enterprise life. The paper proposes a critical comparison between the economic definition of social enterprise by Emes and legal forms in some European Countries as apossible basis for a “European Framework” in institutional form and governance for social enterprise. This is to verify how institutional rules could be fixed to define governance issues and design a social enterprise model in order to overcome economic information asymmetry and business issues.