BEST PRACTICES 371
and Utah.^100 More in line with the scientific community’s
estimate of forensic stylistics, testimony based on forensic
stylistics has been excluded by trial judges in California^101 and
New York.^102 Testimony based on forensic stylistics has been
withdrawn after a rebuttal report, depositions, affidavit, or
evidence hearings in Virginia,^103 Washington,^104 and California.^105
In a case currently under appeal, testimony based on forensic
stylistics was admitted without a Frye hearing because the
plaintiff argued that the method was not scientific and therefore
not subject to Frye, but still presented an expert for opinion
testimony.^106
IV. STYLOMETRIC COMPUTING APPROACH TO AUTHOR
IDENTIFICATION
Stylometric disputes in literature trace their roots to the
Shakespeare, Pauline, and Federalist Papers controversies.
Stylometry is the measurement of style, which has a long history
since the 1880s of quantifying features of written language that
are easy to measure, such as sentence length, word frequency,
or common words among texts. Traditional stylometric features
are grounded in literary criticism, not linguistics. This kind of
analysis is based on school grammar, rhetoric, and textual
criticism, not linguistic theory.
(^100) United States v. Zajac, 748 F. Supp. 2d 1340, 1353 (D. Utah 2010).
(^101) People v. Flinner, No. SCE211301, 2003 WL 24306950 (Cal. Super.
Ct.); Beckman Coulter v. Dovatron Flextronics, No. 01CC08395 (Cal.
Super. Ct. 2003).
(^102) Padiyar v. Yeshiva Univ., No. 110578/05 (N.Y. Sup. Ct. filed Jan.
3, 2006).
(^103) Lesnick v. Mathews, No. CL01009530-00 (Va. Cir. Ct. Nov. 21,
2003), aff’d sub nom. Lindeman v. Lesnick, 604 S.E.2d 55 (2004).
(^104) State v. Preston, No. 02-1-03082-4 (Wash. Super. Ct. Nov. 17,
2004).
(^105) In re Marriage of Isaacs, No. BD403783 (Cal. Super. Ct. L.A. Cnty.
2011); Hanus v. Hale, No. GIC867514 (Cal. Super. Ct. June 14, 2006).
(^106) Respondent’s Exceptions to Referee’s Report and Brief on the Merits
at 49, In re Masters, No. S130495 (Cal. Jan. 12, 2012).