Gimme an 'S': The High Court's Grammatical Divide

Today's Legal Times addresses the issue of whether to use an "s" after the apostrophe when forming possessives of names that already end in "s," like "Kansas" or "Thomas":

As one of its final acts last term, the U.S. Supreme Court issued Kansas v. Marsh, a case involving the constitutionality of a state death-penalty statute. The 5-4 decision exposed the deep divide that exists among the nation's intellectual elite regarding one of society's most troubling issues -- namely, whether the possessive form of a singular noun ending with the letter "s" requires an additional s after the apostrophe.

This is far and away the best, most enjoyable essay I've ever read about punctuation. I love this part:

If the highly visible writers on the Supreme Court cannot be good role models on the relatively noncontroversial question of whether an "s" should be used to form a possessive, then what chance is there that the nation will receive unified guidance on some of the more legitimate debates of our time, such as split infinitives, the use of a comma before the final element of a series, which vs. that, and the use of a plural pronoun in place of a singular pronoun for the purpose of achieving gender neutrality?

Fun! (via Apostrophe Abuse, of course!)

Comments

[Anne Glamore]

This is a major deal to me, and I was taught that you DO add the "S" EXCEPT to Moses, Jesus, Congress, Isis.

WTF kind of rule is that?

[James]

James' opinion on this is that he doesn't like adding the "s" after the apostrophy.

Personal preference. Maybe personal preference has no place in grammar. But if the Supreme Court can't agree, I feel justified in just doing whatever the heck I want. :)

[KUchick]

AP says it's "Kansas' dumbass senator" (I'm from Kansas, so I can say that!) and "the walrus's right tusk." Proper nouns don't get the additional S, regular nouns do. I didn't click through to the article to check, but I wonder who was on which side of the debate. Did Sandra Day O'Connor provide the swing vote?