e57--Correct me if I'm wrong--are you in the Chicago area? It has always been code there to pigtail the neutral(grounded conductor) even in 2 wire circuits for the same reason as the NEC requires it for multi-wire. Since I started in Chicago, we always pigtailed every wire (well, actually we sometimes stripped a solid conductor midway and looped around the screw instead of pigtailing), and I never spliced on the device until I moved to another part of the country, and only then under the foreman's orders because they considered it faster. Plus, in Chicago we never pulled ground wires in a pipe, so there was no (wire)ground to the box or receptacle. In fact you couldn't even buy green screws at the supply house, they never saw them before.
