The Law of the Salem Witch Trials

The thing I love about conferences is the chance to sit in on a really good variety of papers, so kudos to the Boston AALL organisers for putting on such an inspired mix. Choosing the papers to attend today was really hard, I wanted to be in two, or three sessions at once. I'm a believer in eclectic choices, obviously I'll attend the sessions that have direct relevance to my job, but I think we need to mix it up a bit.

First though I'll rewind to yesterday. I won't update you on every session I attended, which isn't to say they weren't all fantastic or of interest. The last session yesterday was as inspiring as the first, held in a smaller room, this was a popular choice with many people - standing room only to listen to Anurag Acharya, one of the two minds who brings us Google Scholar. Acharya discussed Google's approach to publishing and searching US legal opinions. Google is so clean and seamless it's a wonder to me that there are real live mathematicians behind the scenes organizing our (online) world.

Acharya' premise with Scholar was simple, everyone should be able to find and read the laws that govern them, to be free both to read and to search. To search (no surprise to this audience) you need to know things - the right way to formulate queries, and, you need a credit card, or an account. Acharya closely examined case law and citations, how they look on the page to understand them and to find a way to make simple legal queries 'just work'. He wanted to target an Everyman audience, not just for the attorneys and litigators (though it is also for them). Acharya has a very small team (from memory six or eight) to achieve big goals. One point that really resonated with me in relation to legal databases and user testing - he looks at how users use the system rather than just listening to what they say they want - what they actually do online is not always the same thing. My hope is that some of the legal publishers were in the room taking notes.

So back to The Law of the Salem Witch Trials, and my first session for Day 2. When I was studying undergrad in Arts I took a history paper on the European witch hunts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, one among the many papers I happily thought would never be of use in the 'real world'. Right. And wrong. Following your interests is never a waste of time, and, it's amazing sometimes how that knowledge might suddenly come into play in a very useful way. I enjoyed this session and I learnt a lot about the local history of Massachusetts, the troublesome yoking with the UK, colonial American mores, and, that one of the women in the audience traced her ancestry back to two (sadly) executed witches which I thought was impressive.