368 JOURNAL OF LAW AND POLICY
- Professor McMenamin’s work is not accepted as
sound science within the linguistic community....
The process of authorship identification is predicated
on the assumption that writers may betray their
individuality by certain features, and that if two
documents share certain features in common there may
be grounds for assuming that they have the same author.
Note however that a similarity in features is not by itself
a ground for assuming that two documents have the same
author. That depends, rather, on how widespread these
features are in the population as a whole....
It follows that if we have no information about the
statistical frequency of various features of written texts,
we can make no scientific assumptions as to whether they
provide good evidence of authorship or not....
McMenamin has not troubled to do the work of
statistical analysis necessary to teach scientific
conclusions about the authorship of documents—neither
in his report or in his published writings on the
subject....
In the absence of a prior statistical analysis,
McMenamin has no scientific basis for distinguishing
those features of a document that are likely to be likely
cues of authorship, nor does he have any grounds for
assuming that the appearance of the same feature... in
two texts offers significant evidence of common
authorship. In effect, he has no way of distinguishing
left-handed redheads from right-handed brunettes.
Scientifically speaking, McMenamin’s analyses are
worthless.^91
These reviews of forensic stylistics from other academically
degreed linguists suggest two important points for judges to
consider. First, forensic stylistics is not considered standard
linguistics by well-established, highly regarded linguists.
Second, there is certainly no general acceptance of the method,
(^91) Id.