What Gets Cited: The Supreme Court’s 2024 Term in Briefs
A look across all parties' merits briefs at what was cited most frequently broken down by citing entities, cited cases, and cited justices.
In TikTok v. Garland, the Supreme Court confronted a statute threatening to ban one of America’s most popular social media platforms. The Court’s per curiam opinion rejecting TikTok’s emergency application opened with a familiar constitutional principle: “At the heart of the First Amendment lies the principle that each person should decide for himself or herself the ideas and beliefs deserving of expression, consideration, and adherence.” The citation? Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. v. FCC, 512 U.S. 622, 641 (1994).
That same precedent appeared throughout the briefing—but in radically different forms. TikTok’s brief invoked Turner to argue that the government cannot evade strict scrutiny through claims of speaker exceptionalism: Turner “involved a ‘content-neutral’ regulation of the entire cable medium,” the brief argued, and “does not suggest that, where Congress engages in content-and-speaker-based regulation, the Government can evade strict scrutiny by claiming the speaker is ‘special.’” The government’s brief cited the same case for the opposite proposition: Turner “held that a statute requiring cable television systems to carry certain local television stations imposed only an incidental burden on speech because it was ‘meant to protect broadcast television’ from ‘unfair competition by cable systems.’”
Same case. Same citation. Completely different arguments about what it means.
This isn’t unusual—it’s how Supreme Court advocacy works. Citations aren’t neutral markers of legal authority. They’re strategic choices about which precedents lend credibility, which frameworks control the analysis, and which justices’ reasoning will resonate with the Court. The question is: which authorities do advocates choose, and what do those patterns reveal?
In my last post, I examined how Antonin Scalia gets cited in Supreme Court briefs. The analysis of 115 parties’ merits briefs from early 2024 on revealed that Scalia appears frequently but strategically—as interpretive infrastructure for textual canons, as doctrinal architecture in executive power and jurisdictional disputes, and occasionally as rhetorical payload when stakes need framing. But that analysis raised a broader question: if Scalia serves these specific functions, what does the full landscape of citation look like? Which justices dominate the arguments before the Court, and do citation patterns reveal ideological or strategic fault lines?
This article examines all 191 parties’ merits briefs citing 3,482 cases across a total of 5,238 pages of briefs filed during the Supreme Court’s 2024 term. By coding every citation in each brief’s table of authorities (with page counts and then an examination of separate opinion references within the text of each brief), we can see not just which justices advocates invoke most often, but also which law firms cite which authorities, how public interest organizations and the Office of the Solicitor General (OSG) approach citation differently, and what the aggregate picture tells us about how Supreme Court advocacy works today.
The Roberts Court—Literally