Saks participates in discussions at Brooklyn Law School


ASU Regents’ Professor Michael Saks, a Faculty Fellow in the Center for Law, Science & Innovation at the College of Law, participated in two discussions on Oct. 11-12 at the Brooklyn Law School in New York as part of its “Authorship Attribution Workshop.”

According to the organizers, research on the attribution of authorship of documents, which has been used in cases such as identifying the author of the Unabomber Manifesto, and the ransom notes in the JonBenét Ramsey murder case, has developed impressively.

The goal of the workshop was to determine how the current state of the art measures up to legal evidentiary standards by bringing together leading computer scientists and linguists, legal scholars who specialize in the admissibility of scientific evidence in court and scholars specializing in statistical analysis.

Saks’ research focuses on empirical studies of the legal system, especially decision making, the behavior of the litigation system, and the law’s use of science. He is the fourth most-cited law-and-social-science scholar in the U.S., and has authored approximately 200 articles and books.