Harry Potter « The Literary Table

Last week, Warren wrote about the blessings of reading as a dialectic navigating imaginations within the law school curriculum; and I wrote two pieces describing how at least one short story could be used to better explain property — See Devil and Tom Walker I and Devil and Tom Walker II. Today I want to draw on metaphors from Harry Potter to further this case that the law curriculum needs literature infused within it.

Throughout the Harry Potter series there is divide between muggles, muggle things, and the magical world. For example, the ministry of magic has an office for the misuse of muggle artifacts in which muggle things are confiscated when they have been bewitched. Similarly, muggles (or non magical folk) are not permitted to use magical things, at the cost of having their memories wiped in the event they do stumble onto magical things. And yet, despite these stark separations, we see instances in which muggle things are used in the magical world. Radios are used to communicate with members of the order in the final book to advance a magical agenda. The passage way to one’s magical education begins at a muggle train depot (King’s Cross), though again with a separate platform secured behind the veil of a wall. And Magical folk wear muggle clothes, in different degrees of success to blend into the larger muggle culture. See for example, Harry, Hermione, and Ron in the last film, compared with Bob Ogden, the ministry official from the chapter House of Gaunt in the Half Blood Prince.

Whatever these various commingling are in the series, they stand as tools of translation between two different groups that respect divisions, even though individual members might prefer toleration. What exactly is to be translated? John Granger suggests that the magical world helps translate for the reader (ironically a muggle world) the basic and transcendent characteristics of love, mercy, forgiveness, fear, etc…). JK Rowling made this point in an interview with the Atlanta Journal Constitution when she said “Witchcraft is just a metaphor for this other world of possibilities, beyond convention, that the mind can reach.“ As said by one Harry Potter Commentator,

This is a summary of a central premise in Granger’s work, that the “symbols, themes, and meaning touch the human heart with eternal verities and realities for which contact the human heart is designed and hungers” (234). I think you can understand the idea pretty easily. Harry Potter gets to some kind of Truth (Love, forgiveness, fear, etc) that we are all designed to long for.

Two worlds normally separated are joined by their ability to translate through the various interactions that do not necessarily involve their individual members.

So what can we learn from this lesson of metaphor translation in the law school curriculum. Those of us in the law and literature movement have long thought about the process of learning law as a process of translation. There is, though, a tendency to treat the leaning of legal skills as distinctive from the learning of perspective skills. Most agree both are important — but not important enough to merge together.

One of the prevailing themes underlying law students’ entry to law school today is the unpreparedness to understand the art of translation. The ability to identify metaphors in a text, understand their relevance to context and meaning, and then cull out the underlying authorial meaning is directly relevant to what we ask students to learn how to do beginning in their first substantive courses. One way of helping students understand that the process is one that relates to their prior work is to include works of fiction in the substantive courses as a means of bridging their legal education with their undergraduate training. Thus, the process of working through a legal text draws upon familiar modes of interpretation that students have been exposed to prior to entering law school.

Likewise, many works draw implicitly on legal themes as underlying conflict in their stories. Courses like Property draw on theories of possession and entitlement that did not first originate in law, but in philosophical texts — texts which were as influential in literature as they were in law. History and context afford background materials for texts like William Gaddis’ A Frolic of his Own, which implicitly raise critiques of the torts system. As Warren has written in the past, Roger Malvin’s Burial forces students to confront norms in a context outside of law — norms of fairness, just deserts, and equality. In other words, fiction translates the law not only through process but through substance as well.

These materials may serve as means of translating dense subjects to students who are not yet prepared to translate law accurately. Perhaps, muggle radios sending messages of magical occurrences could be just as helpful to transmit messages of legal translation.

Normal. One word that captures the latent dividing struggle in the Harry Potter Novels. Harry Potter simply longs to be; wizards walking through a muggle world can’t seem to be; death eaters long to redefine what it should mean; elves and centaurs seem resolute that they will never be, though responding to that election in different ways. If we think about the Harry Potter world (and this should not surprise us) the question of normal and how we define it (or should define it) is a central theme of character development. But this is not the normal of adolescent teenage angst and rebellion — though certainly that is revealed.

The normal world that Rowling’s envisions is the normal in which every living being has a place, if only he accepts it. The normal is one of choices, structure and well-defined boundaries. Its the normal of centaurs not reducing themselves to the humiliation of humans riding upon their backs, and elves being content and happy to serve their house masters. And most prominently, its the normal of the Statute of Secrecy and the battle to redefine normal in the Harry Potter world. Indeed, both the death eaters and the Order of the Phoenix envision worlds that are different than the one in which the Statute of Secrecy functions. Death eaters perceive a future world in which secrecy is no longer necessary because wizards rule through their strength and sit upon thrones built of muggles. The order (or at least elements within the Order) see a different world too — though its a world of cooperation, integration, and peaceful co-existence. Either way, the war in the end of the novel is not about preserving normalcy — its about redefining it.

One can’t help but notice the role that law plays in this battle to define the new normal in the novels. Indeed, as suggested by John Gava and Jeannie Marie Paterson in their essay: ‘What Role Need Law Play in a Society with Magic’, law does not serve the needs of repairing wrongs as it does in our muggle world — there simply is no need to do with the law what one could set right immediately by magic. But broadly, I believe law performs a greater function than Grana and Patterson suggest — it performs the exact functions we expect law to perform even in muggle society. Namely law defines the social group or groups who are afforded legal entitlements by prescribing certain penalties for either (a) acting outside the social group intended to be protected by the entitlement; or (b) directly violating the entitlement. In other words, law preserves the normal — or at least what the authority would define as normal. Let me offer three tangible examples:

Example one -Serious Black. Serious Black is convicted of murdering muggles and one wizard and then sentenced to Azkaban. The social order at the time that Serious Black was accused of committing these crimes was one of wizard/ muggle coexistence through secrecy. Thus, Black was accused of a crime that interfered and directly challenged the entitlements of muggles to not be killed by wizards using magic: his crime directly challenged the underlying presumption of the law — that muggles have certain rights to not be killed by wizards. (Of course we know that Serious Black really did not kill anyone, but as with muggle law, the crimes which one are accused of do not necessarily constitute the actual crimes that one is subject to).

Example two – Harry Potter and the Dementer’s Trial in Book V. Harry Potter’s trial is clearly a farce. The orchestrated ambush by umbrage who also sits as judge (isn’t it interesting how judges in trials in the series often turn out to be so biased that it shocks the conscious, see i.e., executioner as appeals judge for Buckbeak’s trial); and the rearranged time of the trial so as to prejudice the defendant amongst other things. But most glaring is the role that the authority of the trial serves in preserving the social group it aims to protect. The authorities rearrange the trial time. The authorities set the judge panel. And in this context, Harry is ambushed largely to keep him quiet n the face of a ministry that refuses to admit that Voldemort has returned. The law serves the preservation of the normal by sanctioning those that might upset the balance of normalcy. In other words, Harry’s trial makes it clear that the law is intended to protect those that comply with the ends expected by the ministry of magic. Thus,because Harry refuses to keep quiet regarding Voldemort’s return (a crime he will punished for multiple times in Book V), the law becomes his adversary.

Example three — The Trial of Mary Cattermole. The new normal is that muggle-born wizards and witches are not a protected class — much less entitled to do magic. After Voldemort’s return and the fall of the ministry, a new law comes into effect: the Muggle-Born registration commission. As a result, muggle born wizards and witches are deprived of property they previously acquired lawfully — namely their wands. Like in the trials of Potter and Black, the new order established that Mary was not a part of the social group that was entitled to protection (or certain property) — therefore, she, like other muggle-borns were subject to trial, marginalization, deprivation of property, even the potential punishment of death.

It seems that law’s place in the magical worlds is exactly the same as it is in ours — defining what is deemed to be the normal and sanctioning those that fall outside. It seems to me that this is exactly the meaning underlying Robert Cover’s classic beginning to his article Violence and the Word: “legal interpretation takes place in a field of pain and death.” May we be mindful of the pain and death we inflict and the normal we expect to arise as we do so.

Image above (From Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part I — Snatchers bringing in Muggleborns to the Ministry.

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