[HPforGrownups] Re: Law, Human Rights and democracy in the Wizarding World

[Jenett]

No: HPFGUIDX 31051

On Fri, 7 Dec 2001, cindysphynx wrote:
> I do wonder, however, whether the terrible shortcomings in the 
> wizarding justice system are by design (to keep it simple)or are just 
> due to some lack of understanding about how some of these things are 
> supposed to work.  

I think it's actually something much simpler: simple lack of population 
and population density. 

A community of 25,000 or 50,000 needs far different sets of requirements 
than a community ten or a hundred times bigger. In a situation where most 
adults know or know of each other (not impossible in a community whose 
total size is 25,000 or so with a single school serving the geographic 
area), you don't need the same kinds of governing systems that you need in 
other situations.

It might also be that the Voldemort related trials are the first time such 
trials have come up in anyone's living memory, and that they just don't 
need to do them all that often. 

It seems like most against-the-law things (using magic on Muggles, etc) 
are pretty straightforward - you do it, you get a certain punishment, the 
situation is cut and dry. (Much like, say, most schools have certain 
punishments. At most they might have a small committee that oversees such 
issues, but that's about as complex as it gets)

It's entirely possible, however, that Voldemort was the first person (or 
at least the first person in a long time) to coerce people, to use the 
Unforgiveable Curses, etc. And so the system just wasn't really designed 
to deal with it, and they had to scramble together something that worked, 
while having lost a lot of people who *were* responsible and in 
responsible positions on top of that. 

It's not really suprising that things might be a bit.. irregular in that 
case. A good example, perhaps, is some of the post WWII legal stuff - 
people were dealing with issues that no one had really dealt with much 
before, partly becuase you were dealing with an international issue for 
the first time. It doesn't suprise me that in a similar 'eep, we've never 
dealt with this before' instance in a community without a strong legal 
tradition that you'd scramble and make some errors of judgement. 

(I'd point out that we really don't know much about how Grindewald came to
power, or how his minions, if there were minions, might have been
recruited. It may be that they were all clearly guilty (assuming that
Grindewald had minions), and there weren't issues of people acting under
the Imperious curse, and so on which complicate the Voldemort issues. 
Basically, we don't have much real data on the most recent pre-Voldemort 
Dark Wizard who might have produced lots of trials. Or might not have. We 
don't know.)

So, between the question of scale, and the fact that it might be a new 
issue that hadn't come up before (or at least not at all recently), I 
don't see anything really bizzare about what structure we see. It's an 
administrative framework, really, not a judicial one, even though the 
administrative stuff includes stuff that is called 'legal' and 'illegal'.