Thursday, October 11
9:00 am - 5:00 pm
Friday, October 12
9:00 am - 4:00 pm
Subotnick Center, 10th Floor
250 Joralemon Street
Brooklyn
Sponsored by the National Science Foundation, the Center for Law, Language and Cognition, and the Journal of Law and Policy.
Online registration is now closed. Please call Alice Loeb at 718-780-7904 if you would like to register. On-site registration will also be available at the event.
One (1) CLE Credit, in the category of Ethics, will be offered on Thursday, October 11, from 9:00 – 10:00am. This credit is transitional and non-transitional. There is no charge. Please arrive early and inquire at the registration table to receive this credit.
About the Program
It is not unusual for a legal case to depend on who wrote a particular document. The question has arisen in many high-profile cases, such as identifying the author of the Unabomber Manifesto, and the ransom notes in the JonBenét Ramsey murder case and the Lindburgh baby kidnapping and murder case. It arises in many less-celebrated criminal and civil cases on a regular basis.
Research on the attribution of authorship of documents has developed impressively. Yet while testimony on the source of documents in high-profile legal cases has attracted significant media attention, the field has remained mostly under the radar screen of American judges and evidence scholars. Computer models are being created and tested in which the method is employed in a uniform manner. Error rates are reported, with a healthy competition among various practitioners to develop the best algorithms and to use statistical analysis that will get the most out of the analyses produced. At the same time, scholars in linguistics whose methods are less quantitative, offer new and important insights. Read More
View the Agenda
Speakers
Shlomo Argamon
Associate Professor of Computer Science
Illinois Institute of Technology
Ronald R. Butters
Professor Emeritus, English and Cultural Anthropology
Duke University
Bob Carpenter
Associate Research Scientist
Columbia University
Carole E. Chaski
President and CEO, ALIAS Technology LLC
Executive Director, Institute for Linguistic Evidence
Edward Cheng
Professor of Law
Vanderbilt Law School
Malcolm Coulthard
Distinguished Visiting Professor, Postgraduate Programme in English
Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures Federal University of Santa Catarina Florianopolis Brazil;
Emeritus Professor of Forensic Linguistics, Aston University
Stephen E. Fienberg
Maurice Falk University Professor of Statistics and Social Science
Carnegie Mellon University
Edward Finegan
Professor of Linguistics and Law
Gould School of Law
Director, Center for Excellence in Teaching
University of Southern California
Núria Gavaldà
PhD Student in Forensic Linguistics
ForensicLab - Institut Universitari de Lingüística Aplicada (IULA)
Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona, Spain)
Tim Grant
Director, Centre for Forensic Linguistics
School of Languages and Social Sciences
Aston University, Birmingham, UK
Patrick Juola
Associate Professor of Computer Science
Department of Mathematics and Computer Science
Duquesne University
Jonathan Koehler
Beatrice Kuhn Professor of Law
Northwestern University School of Law
Moshe Koppel
Professor of Computer Science
Bar-Ilan University
D. Michael Risinger
John J. Gibbons Professor of Law
Seton Hall University School of Law
Michael J. Saks
Regents Professor, Law and Psychology
Arizona State University
Lawrence Solan
Don Forchelli Professor of Law
Brooklyn Law School
Efstathios Stamatatos
Assistant Professor
Department of Information and Communications Systems Engineering
University of the Aegean
Maria Teresa Turell
Professor of English Linguistics
ForensicLab, Institut Universitari de Lingüística Aplicada (IULA)
Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Carl Vogel
Director of Research, School of Computer Science and Statistics Director, Centre for Computing and Language Studies
Trinity College Dublin
Please check back at a later date for more information about this program.