The Progeny of Florida v. Jardines

My Honors 300: Writing in the Law students from the last two semesters will find this interesting. Remember that Florida v. Jardines involved a drug sniffing dog on the porch/curtilage of a home. Remember also that the dog and its handler stayed on the porch for some time, longer than someone who knocks and leaves. Well, the Court of Appeals of Indiana (a state court) in J.K. v. State just relied on Jardines to rule that officers need to knock and leave. That is, police officers have an implied invitation to approach a door and to knock on it. They can’t, well, do the following:

The officers surrounded J.K.’s residence around one o’clock in the morning and repeatedly knocked on the door for over forty-five minutes. During that span of time, the officers peered through the windows and continuously yelled into the house demanding that an occupant answer the door.

You can read the opinion at the link above or read a summary on The Volokh Conspiracy.

A Punctuation Conspiracy

Law professor Eugene Volokh, of the eponymous blog The Volokh Conspiracy, posted today on punctuation rules. A self-described “descriptivist,” he writes that “descriptivists don’t deny there are rules — they just say the rules are dictated by “the will of custom, in whose power is the decision and right and standard of language.” He then goes on to discuss one of the two punctuation rules that befuddle my writing students throughout the semester–be they freshmen or seniors:

1. Place commas and periods inside quotation marks, e.g.,

The Court’s answer to this was “no.”

Seems simple enough, but it’s apparently not. I’ve stressed this little rule semester after semester, and yet . . .

This rule has a corollary:

2. Place all other punctuation marks outside quotation marks, unless they are logically parts of the quotation. I have seen some departures from this where semicolons or question marks are involved, but my sense is that those departures remain rather rare exceptions in modern legal publications.

The Court’s answer to this was “no”; but two years later, the Court changed its mind.
Was the Court’s answer “yes” or “no”?
The Court’s response was, in essence, “Says who?” [The question mark is logically part of the quotation.]

For what it’s worth, I’m a repenting prescriptivist.

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