Finding Law: Organized Interests and the Confinement of Executive Primacy

Filing written briefs before apex courts is a key channel through which federal executives, subnational governments, and private actors shape legal rules. Existing theory predicts that federal executives should dominate rulemaking because their legal offices are the preeminent repeat player for rules-yet no quantitative study has tested this claim. Using newly available full-text observations submitted to the European Court of Justice between 2022 and 2025, I measure whose proposal is semantically closest to the Court's operative part. Contrary to expectations, the Commission is closer to the Court's rule than member states only in slightly more than half of cases, while private actors are closest in nearly one-third; each additional member state brief reduces the Commission's advantage. These findings show that repeat-player status does not guarantee interpretive primacy, leaving executive influence over rulemaking competitively constrained.