Were Briefs in the Supreme Court Tariff Case Written with Specific Justices in Mind?

A trope among SCOTUS watchers concerns how seasoned attorneys try to garner specific justices' votes that may be decisive through strategic framing. This article applies this logic.

In closely divided Supreme Court cases, advocates think about more than the merits. They think about audiences. The Court decides cases collectively, but each justice approaches statutory and constitutional questions with distinct priorities. Some emphasize text and structural limits. Others focus on institutional coherence, administrative consequences, or constitutional boundaries.

That raises a practical question: when advocates write in a high-stakes case, do their briefs reflect generalized persuasion directed at the Court as a whole, or do they concentrate argument in ways that align more closely with particular chambers?

The consolidated tariff litigation provides a clean setting to examine that question. The case involves statutory authority, separation of powers, and the scope of executive economic power—areas where the Court’s internal divisions are well developed.

Consider the contrast between two argumentative approaches that appear in the merits briefing.

The government’s opening brief repeatedly argues that IEEPA “authorizes” the tariffs and that Congress vested broad emergency authority in the President.

The private respondents’ brief repeatedly contends that IEEPA “does not authorize” the tariffs and that the statutory text provides no such basis.

Both arguments address the Court. Each draws on a distinct jurisprudential emphasis. If briefs are written with specific justices in mind, those emphases should cluster systematically across the corpus rather than appear randomly distributed.

This article tests that hypothesis empirically. It measures which justices each brief most closely resembles at the textual level, how concentrated that resemblance is, and whether targeting patterns vary by side. It also compares observed targeting to a simple swing justice benchmark defined by proximity to the Court’s ideological center. That benchmark identifies which justices sit closest to the median of the current Court’s ideological spectrum and therefore might plausibly attract strategic emphasis in a closely divided case.

The analysis focuses on observable language patterns. It evaluates where argument appears to be concentrated. It does not claim that targeting determines votes or outcomes.

How This Analysis Works

The analysis covers 44 briefs filed in the consolidated tariff litigation. The corpus includes amicus briefs and merits briefs.

What Targeting Means Here

Each brief was divided into fixed-length segments. Those segments were compared to justice-specific language profiles constructed from validated snippet sets associated with each chamber. These profiles reflect recurring themes, phrasing patterns, and jurisprudential vocabulary historically associated with each justice.

The comparison uses cosine similarity — a standard measure of how closely two bodies of text resemble one another in vocabulary and phrase usage. For each segment of each brief, similarity was calculated against every justice profile.