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.
I searched in all T.C. opinions for 2019 and found that the opinions go both ways.  Here is the spreadsheet of results.  I used the pdf search--<ctrl-F>- and searched on ." and then on ".  That search feature counts the instances in the pdf file.  I did not review the instances to try to discern if there was some pattern for inconsistent treatments within the opinions.  I probably would have felt some need to do so if the Supreme Court treatments were not so uniform (see table below).

Opinion	Judge	."	".
DAF Charters, LLC	Ashford	7	5
Damian K. Gregory & Shayla A. Gregory	Buch	12	2
Randy Alan Carpenter	Cohen	26	8
Levon Johnson	Gerber	4	4
Atlantic Pacific Management Group LLC	Goeke	1	0
Mary K. Feigh & Edward M. Feigh	Goeke	20	9
Northern California Small Business Assistants Inc.	Goeke	43	22
Blue Lake Rancheria Economic Development Corporation	Goeke	19	31
Palmolive Building Investors, LLC, DK Palmolive Building Investors Participants, LLC, Tax Matters Partner	Gustafson	9	9
Gwendolyn L. Kestin	Gustafson	18	21
ATL & Sons Holdings Inc.	Gustafson	10	30
Richard E. Lacey, II	Gustafson	20	34
Maria Ivon Moya	Halpern	21	8
Eaton Corporation and Subsidiaries	Kerrigan	7	3
Eaton Corporation and Subsidiaries	Kerrigan	17	10
Coal Property Holdings, LLC, Coal Land Manager, LLC, Tax Matters Partner	Lauber	68	0
William C. Lipnick & Dale A. Lipnick	Lauber	24	0
MoneyGram International, Inc. and Subsidiaries	Lauber	146	0
Craig S. Walquist & Maria L. Walquist	Lauber	37	0
Renee Vento	Lauber	71	11
U.S. Auto Sales, Inc.	Marvel	30	7
Linda J. Romano-Murphy	Morrison	55	17
Ag Processing, Inc a cooperative and Subsidiaries	Paris	11	13
Charles K. Breland, Jr.	Pugh	10	3
James Clay & Audrey Osceola	Pugh	31	9
Whistleblower 769-16W	Thornton	14	0
Vitaly Nikolaevich Baturin	Wells	11	15

I then did anecdotal checks on Supreme Court cases, choosing the last 5 and 3 cases I paid special attention to in 2019.  Here is the spreadsheet of those results.

Opinion	Date	."	".	Pages
Retirement Plans Comm. of IBM v. Jander (includes concurring)	Jan-20	20	0	8
Ritzen Group, Inc. v. Jackson Masonry, LLC	Jan-20	36	0	14
Peter v. NantKwest, Inc.	Dec-19	22	0	12
Rotkiske v. Klemm	Dec-19	29	0	18
Thompson v. Hebdon	Nov-19	9	0	6
Kisor v. Wilkie	Jun-19	121	0	40
Gundy v. United States	Jun-19	103	0	56
PDR Network, LLC v. Carlton Harris Chiropractic, Inc.	Jun-19	32	0	30

You will note that the Supreme is uniform in its use of the “American usage.” (Note where I placed the period.)

Added 1/25/20 12:00 pm:  The Supreme Court results should not be surprising because the Supreme Court's Style Guide, p. VII-2 (page 166 of the pdf) (2016), here and here, which provides in § 7.3, Punctuation:  "Quotation marks close after a period or comma but before a colon or semicolon."  (To go to the specific page in the Guide click here.)  So, the Justices, their clerks and their proofreaders were simply following the Style Guide.  One would think, though, that, if this particular style (periods inside end quotes) is good for the Supreme Court it would be good for the lower courts as well, at least it would be better than no style where inconsistent styles are used in the same document.  (Because irrelevant to the main topic of this blog, in finding the Supreme Court Style Guide, I came across some other interesting style resources related to the Style Guide; I link those at the end of this blog.)

So the big question of the day is whether, when doing a block quote from an opinion where there is a period after the end quote, do I correct it, leave it without further ado, or flag it with a “sic?”  I actually had this issue presented a couple of weeks ago in an article that will be published shortly.  I quoted a tax court opinion where the period was outside the end quote.  I first footnoted it with some snarky comment about periods outside the quote.  I deleted that footnote.  I next considered the sic and rejected that because it too is snarky.  I finally left it as the Tax Court opinion presented it.

Addendum:  I just did a similar search on the pdfs for my Federal Tax Procedure book editions (see here).  If the nit I pick here be error, I too am guilty as follows:

	."	".
JAT Federal Tax Procedure 2019 Practitioner Ed.	1198	2
JAT Federal Tax Procedure 2019 Student Ed.	544	1

The locations of those errors (".) are:

• Practitioner edition errors:  p. 905 fn. 3865 & p. 910.
• Student edition errors:  p. 620.

I have corrected those errors for the next editions (2020).

Added 1/25/20 12:00 pm.  Another error.  When I posted this blog a couple of days ago, I erroneously labeled the caption:  "Does the Comma Go Inside or Outside the End Quotes."  Then the blog entry itself was on periods and end quotes.  Oh well.  I have corrected it now.

As indicated above, I found the Supreme Court Style Guide which speaks to the issue raised in this blog.  Here are some resources I came across regarding the Style Guide but provides some helpful discussions:

• Brendan Kenny, The Secret Style Guide the Supreme Court Doesn’t Want You to Read (Lawyerist Blog 4/28/17), here.
• Elizabeth Scott Moise, Is Your Writing Good Enough for the Supreme Court? (U.S. Supreme Court Style Guide) (Nelson Mullins Riley & Scarborough, LLP 11/21/17), here.