This book unites scholarship on law and politics with compliance research in the EU to shed light on the political role of a neglected dimension of litigation in the EU: the political role of governmental actions for annulment. The book does not portray national governments as passive actors within the EU’s judicial arena. Instead it focuses on cases in which national governments turn to the Court of Justice to litigate against the European Commission, and provides several answers to the question of why EU member state governments take this decision. Governments hope, on the one hand, to evade costly domestic adjustments where the Commission uses administrative acts to interfere with domestic policy application. On the other hand, governments hope to provoke judicial law-making to influence the long-term development of EU administrative law and sectoral regulation. The book will be of particular interest to political scientists and legal scholars.                                                                                                                                     .