Year: 2013
Type: article
Abstract: This is a very unconventional journal article, the likes of which I have never before written.It is based on a paper that was conceived of and written for the Authorship Attribution Workshop ("Workshop") hosted at Brooklyn Law School in October 2012 with the intention of exploring the boundaries of admissibility of linguistic evidence in U.S. courts.This paper focuses on admissible linguistic evidence in an English court and explores whether some or all of it would be accepted in a U.S. court, where the Daubert acceptability criteria,1 particularly information about known rates of error, are more rigorous than the criteria currently in force in the U.K. Interestingly, it is likely that Daubert-like criteria will be introduced into the U.K. in the not too distant future, so it was not just academic curiosity that that led me to inquire whether my evidence would be admissible.Specifically, I wondered if in the U.S. I would be permitted to express an opinion on the evidence or only to act as a "tour guide," 2 simply presenting the linguistic evidence to the court without evaluation.The general consensus of the Workshop's evidence experts was that most of my evidence would indeed be allowable in a U.S. court.Comments made during the Workshop about my presentation and analytic advances outlined by Dr. Tim Grant during his presentation have led me to revise and add to my analysis.As a consequence, what you will read below is, I hope, a more
Source: bepress Legal Repository
Author: Malcolm Coulthard
Institution: Brooklyn Law School
Language: English
Subfield: Law
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2994377576