Does the Period Go Inside or Outside the End Quote? A Tax Court and Supreme Court Comparison (1/23/20; 1/25/20)

Added 4/9/20:  I have been advised that the Tax Court has a style manual that, paraphrased, says the rule is:  "periods go inside quotes only if the period is part of the quote (ie you are quoting to the end of the quoted sentence).  Otherwise, periods go outside the quote because the period is not part of the quote."  (Caveat: for the foregoing paraphrasing which I received from another person, I followed the Supreme Court style manual by including the period inside the quote even though the original had additional words before the period in the original.) I have not  seen the manual and am  trying to obtain a copy.  If anyone knows of a public link to it or has it and can provide it to me, I would greatly appreciate it.  (Please email to jack@tjtaxlaw.com.)

The balance of this web post is the same as it existed prior to 4/9/20.

Note that this blog has been revised, most importantly, to include the Supreme Court Style Guide.  See below after the spreadsheet on Supreme Court opinions.

Also, I am updating the lists below from time to time on a page to the right titled: Updates on the Tax Court's Continued Love Affair with Periods Outside Quotations (1/4/20; 2/29/20), here.

Readers will have noticed that, occasionally, in my blogs I nit pick, but usually only as a detour from the topic of the blog.  Today, a nit pick is the topic of the blog.

Recently, I started paying some attention to the Tax Court opinions placement of end quotes – inside or outside the period.  I noticed that in some of my anecdotal reads that Tax Court opinions (of all sorts, T.C., and T.C.M. and Summary) are inconsistent on that weighty topic.

The American rule, as I understand is, always inside the end quote.  See, e.g.:

• Dreyer’s English (2019), p. 55 (“Though semicolons, because they are elusive and enigmatic and they like it that way, are set outside terminal quotation marks, periods and commas—and if I make this point once, I’ll make it a thousand times, and trust me, I will—are always set inside. Always.”)
• Why do periods and commas go inside quotation marks in MLA style? (The MLA (Modern Language Association) Style Center 2/1/2018), here (“ William Strunk, Jr., and E. B. White, writing in 1959, noted that ‘[t]ypographical usage dictates the comma be inside the marks, though logically it seems not to belong there’” and “if you are preparing a paper for a class or for publication in the United States, place periods and commas inside quotation marks.”)
• How to Use Quotation Marks: mysteries of combining quotation marks with other punctuation marks (Grammar Girl Quick and Dirty Tips 12/26/13), here, (“ in American English we always put periods and commas inside quotation marks”).
• Periods and Quotation Marks (The Writing Cooperative 9/1/18), here (“The period should go inside the quotation marks.”
• Bryan A. Garner, Correct Placement Of Punctuation In Relation To Quotation Marks (Above the Law 5/12/14), here,

So, having a choice today between watching the impeachment hearings, I decided that I could better occupy myself with other things.  I did. One of those things was to prepare the spreadsheets offered below in this blog.