Updates on the Tax Court's Continued Love Affair with Periods Outside Quotations (1/4/20; 2/29/20)

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.)

I wrote a blog recently on the Tax Court's love affair with periods outside Quotations, although there is considerable inconsistency (dare I say infidelity there).  See Does the Period Go Inside or Outside the End Quote? A Tax Court and Supreme Court Comparison (1/23/20; 1/25/20), here.

I will use this page to report periodic checks on the subject.  I will not test all Memorandum and T.C. opinions (reviewed and unreviewed) after my original posting.  But I will sort of randomly check some.  So, here are the interim results with more to come as my interest periodically kicks in and I am otherwise bored so that I can divert my attention to this matter.

For the tables below, the lead author on a reviewed Tax Court opinion will be identified, but the statistics relate to every instance in the pdf.  Some T.C. opinions may be reviewed opinions, so any dissenting opinion authors are not identified.  Reviewed opinions will be identified in the type column as “T.C. reviewed.”

This update is as of 2/29/20:

Updates	Date	Type	Judge	."	".
Hubert W. Chang	1/29/2020	Memo	Gerber	0	2
Christian Bernd Alber	1/30/2020	Memo	Gustafson	7	2
Nathaniel A. Carter & Stella C. Carter	2/3/2020	Memo	Halpern	33	8
Railroad Holdings, LLC, Railroad Land Manager, LLC, Tax Matters Partner	2/5/2020	Memo	Gustafson	5	6
Richard Essner	2/12/2020	Memo	Marvel	3	0
Oakhill Woods, LLC, Effingham Managers, LLC, Tax Matters Partner	2/13/2020	Memo	Lauber	60	0
Alvin E. Keels, Sr.	2/19/2020	Memo	Colvin	4	7
Rock Bordelon & Torie Bordelon	2/20/2020	Memo	Gustafson	9	6
Dung T. Le & Nghia T. Tran	2/26/2020	Memo	Paris	6	2

In the initial blog, I listed a comparable analysis for Supreme Court cases.  I update that list also, but do not identify the author since all opinions conform to the Supreme Court style manual requiring ." rather than ".

Opinion	Date	."	".	Pages
Hernandez v. Mesa	Feb-20	78	0	42
Intel Corp. v. Corp. Inv. Policy Comm.	Feb-20	31	0	12
McKinney v. Arizona	Feb-20	25	0	16

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.