Underage Magic....

[ereshkigal_doom]

No: HPFGUIDX 147437

mandorino222said:

> This actually bothers me a lot.  If they could detect magic, but did 
> not know what the source of the magic was (see Dobby in book 2), 
then 
> how can Tonks use magic to pack Harry's trunk in OotP without the 
> ministry detecting it and attributing it to Harry?
> 

I suspect that underage magic detection works rather like unlicensed 
TV detector vans. In the UK we have to pay a license fee to watch TV, 
and there are supposed to be special vans that go around detecting 
whether you are using a TV without a license or not. Popular wisdom 
maintains that the license authority only owns one or two vans, so you 
are unlikely to be caught that way.

In other words, the ministry can probably only detect magic use if 
someone is actually watching your location on the underaged-magic 
crystal ball (or whatever), so you would have to be unlucky or 
specially targetted to be caught. It's mostly an empty threat. The 
ministry only got Harry for it because they really wanted to get him 
for something at that point, and so assigned someone to watch him at 
all times.

Jan