The troubling questions of interpretation and intent that the Semicolon Law dredged up still haunt our justice system. Twenty-first-century legal thinking on the question of punctuation is ostensibly just an amplified version of the competing principles the Massachusetts Supreme Court weighed as it wrestled with the Semicolon Law case. “The modern Court recognizes that grammar and punctuation often clarify meaning,” allows a 2010 guide to statutory interpretation. Yet in determining a statute’s “true meaning,” “the Court remains reluctant . . . to place primary importance on punctuation”—and
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