Benjamin Peirce and the Howland Will

Abstract

The Howland will case is possibly the earliest instance in American law of the use of probabilistic and statistical evidence. Identifying 30 downstrokes in the signature of Sylvia Ann Howland, Benjamin Peirce attempted to show that a contested signature on a will had been traced from another and genuine signature. He argued that their agreement in all 30 downstrokes was improbable in the extreme under a binomial model. Peirce supported his model by providing a graphical test of goodness of fit. We give a critique of Peirce's model and discuss the use and abuse of the “product rule” for multiplying probabilities of independent events.

Key Words:

• Charles S. Peirce
• 19th-century mathematical statistics
• Law and statistics
• Handwriting analysis
• Independence
• Product rule