teddy and teddy sitting in a tree...

The late lamented Spy magazine had a feature called "Logrolling In Our Time" in which they highlighted the delightfully insular world of book blurb trading: I will approvingly blurb about you/cite to you as if by chance, rather than because you are my pal/concubine/secret love child. (Yr Wonket highlighted an excellent example of Thomas Friedman logrolling oh so many years ago.)

Logrolling is ridiculous, but it at least involves you approvingly referencing a person who is, well, not you. Ted Cruz, however, is not interested in praising people who are not also too named Ted Cruz, which is why he cited himself not once, but twice, in briefs to the United States Supreme Court. Oh, Ted.

[T]he U.S Supreme Court received a written brief from Texas Solicitor General Ted Cruz with a very unusual footnote. The case was called Locke v. Davey, and it concerned the constitutionality of a Washington State college scholarship that excluded students studying religion—a key issue for the movement conservatives Cruz considered his political allies.[...] Among those sources was an obscure article about animal sacrifice, which the author argued should be allowed as an expression of religious liberty. The subject matter was unusual for a Supreme Court brief, but even more unusual was the article: It was a student’s analysis published nearly a decade earlier in a conservative journal at Harvard Law School.

Cruz didn’t name the student author in his brief. But if the justices had looked it up, they would have found a surprise: It was a 24-year-old Harvard law student named Ted Cruz.

Let's have some Real Law Prof talk here, if we may. Generally, we discourage students from citing (even when they write to imaginary courts) to law review notes written by students because courts -- especially the highest goddamn court in the land -- do not care what a law student thinks. Next, you generally have no occasion to cite yourself when writing to a court. You are not that special. You particularly have no occasion to cite to your fucking student writing. And finally, you don't cite to yourself in secret especially MORE THAN ONCE. What the fuck, Ted?

In fact, Cruz cited his own 1994 article not once but twice before the Supreme Court: in briefs submitted in Locke v. Davey and in another religious liberty case in 2006, Anderson v. Town of Durham. Cruz referred to the article only to support a few general statements—nothing groundbreaking or controversial. But he didn’t identify himself as the article’s author either time—which was a violation of the legal citation guidelines in place at the time and, legal experts say, was a bit deceptive.

“I think the court would have preferred to know, and might have felt somewhat misled if anyone went to read the note,” says Douglas Laycock, a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law and a leading legal authority on religious liberty. “I would have identified myself.”

Ted probably didn't mention he was citing to Ted because SCOTUS would have been just too dazzled over the prospect of all that Ted.

Ted Cruz has found the greatest love of all inside of him. The greatest love of Ted is easy to achieve. Ted Cruz learning to love himself is the greatest love of all.

[Politico]