EU governments dissatisfied with new community rules can seek legal means, requesting the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) to annul them. The literature on international agreements teaches us that governmental decisions to adjudicate disputes are strategic, as governments anticipate their odds of success and the signals to key audiences. Yet, while in the WTO context, governments target trade barriers over which they have no (direct) influence, in the EU setting they are usually directly involved in bargaining over the legal acts that subsequently trigger legal conflict. Since the bargaining stage affects both the governments’ preferences over annulment, and their chances to succeed, under which conditions will governments choose to request annulment by the CJEU? This paper argues that governments face a strategic tradeoff between showing commitment to domestic interests and picking winnable cases in order to avoid publicly visible legal defeats. Governments strategically balance their public commitment to policy positions against the legal strength of their case. Pivotal governments can strike a more robust balance than governments with outlying preferences, with important implications for their selection of cases and odds of success in court. I systematically test my argument on a dataset of the universe of EU legal acts, covering more than 130.000 observations. I apply recent methods to address zero-inflation (most acts never experience annulment requests) and governmental coordination in requesting annulments. The findings contribute to debates in the literatures on EU judicial politics as well as international cooperation in the EU and beyond.