Permission Slip / Karkaroff's Age / Elf Respect

[catlady_de_los_angeles]

No: HPFGUIDX 38246

Nova wrote:

> I can't imagine a situation where a child without a signed 
> permission slip from a parent/guardian would be allowed to attend 
> any sort of trip outside school grounds. If something were to
> happen to him, they and Hogwarts would be held responsible.

That is VERY true in the USA Muggle world in which I live, but the UK 
Wizard world seems to be a LOT less litigious. In fact, a lot less 
bureaucratic. Students at Hogwarts mess with so many dangerous 
things: playing Quidditch, making potions that can explode if 
something goes wrong, proximity to the Forbidden Forest full of 
dangerous creatures, etc, that it is *amazing* to me that no student 
has been killed at Hogwarts since Myrtle, '50 years' ago. We have see 
no clue that the Dursleys had to sign a permission slip for Harry to 
play Quidditch, take Potions class, or take Care of Magical Creatures 
class, so it seems to be wizarding law (or wizarding custom, which I 
expect is more powerful than wizarding law) that Hogwarts (presumably 
as embodied in Headmaster) is recognized as the guardian of Hogwarts 
students. (I find it odd that Hogwarts requires permission slips for 
Hogsmeade outings but not for playing Quidditch.)

That would go along with the suggestion that someone made that 
Dumbledore is Harry's wizarding-world guardian, giving him the right 
to decide where Harry would live (with Dursleys) and to authorize 
money being taken from Harry's Gringotts vault for school expenses 
(and possibly for the Nimbus 2000). I agree that Dumbledore is 
Harry's wizarding world guardian, but suspect that the wizarding 
world doesn't have laws or legal hearings to decide who should be a 
child's guardian, but merely accepts whatever wizarding adult is 
acting in that position: ie that Dumbledore became Harry's guardian 
by picking him out from the ashes and making the arrangements for 
him. Either way, Dumbledore (and McGonagall as his delegate) would 
have the right to sign Harry's permission slip. 

Here in the USA Muggle world, even if the parent has signed a paper 
giving the school in loco parentis rights, the parent would sue the 
school if the student were killed on an outing, in sports, in class 
experiments, etc. In some cases the parents would win. I believe that 
in the wizarding world, the parents wouldn't even think of suing 
Hogwarts for their child being killed at school: they would either 
accept it as part of the tragic sense of life or they would seek 
PERSONAL vengeance on whichever adult they considered at fault. This 
is part of that parallel of wizarding world with 'Livian Rome' that 
some brilliant list member pointed out.

A digression: I wonder if the Lestranges had children, what happened 
to them when both parents were sent to Azkaban? Presumably if they 
had relatives, some relatives would have 'unofficially adopted' the 
children out of family duty, so MoM would not have had to get 
involved at all. Suppose there were no relatives left alive and out 
of Azkaban and no one willing to take in a convicted Death Eater's 
children -- would MoM have stepped in to find them a foster family, 
or simply left them to live or die on their own? 

Grey Wolf wrote:

> Anyway, can you believe I never considered Karkaroff as a 
> Hogwart's teacher? I picture him about Snape's age

Marina Rusalka wrote:

> I've always imagined Karkaroff as being in his mid-fifties or so --
> about half-way between Snape and McGonagall. Part of it is that 
> he's described as having white hair;

I never thought of Karkaroff being a Hogwarts student or teacher 
until I read it on this list, but I did think of him as being only a 
few years older than Snape, so that they could have become sort of 
friends and equals when they met in the Death Eaters. Having become 
Headmaster of Durmstrang so young would only have been evidence of 
his skill at conniving.

HOWEVER, that beard of his is white in GoF, altho' it was black in 
the Pensieve flashback. When we saw Dumbledore 100 years old in the 
CoS flashback, his hair and beard were still *auburn* (and he was not 
yet Headmaster). This argues for Karkaroff being at least 100 years 
old, to be a Headmaster and have a white beard. 

Athena wrote:

> Also that you should treat everyone with dignity and respect. Many 
> in the WW simply do not do that. For example, Amos Diggory's 
> questioning of Winky where he never once asked her what her name 
> was. He simply referred to her as "Elf."

I have often mentioned my theory that, in that scene, Arthur and Amos 
had fallen into the 'Good Cop, Bad Cop' technique of questioning a 
suspect. (That they fell into it so automatically suggests to me that 
it was an old habit, which in turn suggests to me that they had 
worked as partners in some sort of Law Enforcement or Investigative 
work in the past.) The 'bad cop' is always nasty and disrespectful to 
the suspect, even if the suspect is a well-dressed, rich old white 
man (even President of USA). If only we got to see Arthur and Amos 
questioning Rookwood, maybe we would have seen Amos calling him out 
of his name, just 'old man', 'crybaby', 'traitor'.

On another tentacle, saying someone 'Old man' or 'Woman' or 'Elf' is 
not NECESSARILY disrespectful -- this reminds me vaguely of something 
from THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO -- he was speaking of some woman dissident 
who was *such* an engaging speaker that the bureaucrats of the 
dissidence-suppression police who were typing up her paperwork were 
so entranced that they begged her to go on and on. And he said they 
had a problem of what to call her, since it was against the rules to 
give a prisoner the respect of calling her by name, and they *sure* 
couldn't call a traitor 'Comrade', but it doesn't work to call a 
person 'Prisoner' while begging her for more stories, so they called 
her 'Woman'. "Woman, go on with the story, what happened after that?" 
He said they thought that if calling a woman 'Woman' was good enough 
for Jesus Christ, it was good enough for them.

Athena already posted that Voldemort didn't need to conjure up 
or kidnap a baby, as he had the equipment (Bertha and Peter) to 
make one the old-fashioned way. I can add: that way, he could have 
used his magic to make the developing baby particularly suitable for 
his purposes from the beginning.

Also already posted was my question as to "Where does it say 
Karkaroff was a Hogwarts student?" and my quote that Dumbledore 
said that Vernon and Petunia were the ONLY family Harry had left.