Years before this semicolon reared its head in Massachusetts, the U.S. Supreme Court itself had weighed in on punctuation in a case that involved not going out for bourbon, but bringing home the bacon: when some pigs escaped from a farmer’s pen one night and a neighbor found and boarded them for several days, the two men got into a dispute over whether the law required the owner of the pigs to reimburse their rescuer for room and board, and a comma in the relevant statutes played a key role in the case.
