An Indian law school now offers a Harry Potter course
The new module looks at the innocence of the Sirius Black and the role of dementors in wizarding society
Fancy being the first muggle to sit on the Wizengamot? You're in luck: a top law school in India is training students using JK Rowling’s Harry Potter books.
Titled “An interface between Fantasy Fiction Literature and Law: Special focus on Rowling's Potterverse”, the module offered to students at Kolkata’s National University of Juridical Sciences intends to draw legal comparisons between the real-life and wizarding worlds.
This entails examining how social rights in India compare to the "enslavement of house-elves and the marginalisation of werewolves", a topic of conversation we’re sure Hermione would appreciate.
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The course will also explore Quidditch and sports law at Hogwarts, the innocence of Sirius Black, persecution of Tom Riddle, unbreakable vows and whether the despair-inducing Dementors of Azkaban prevent any hope of reformation.
According to Professor Shouvik Kumar Guha, who designed the course, the topics are an “experiment” to “encourage creative thinking.”
“In our current system, we simply tell students the black letter of law,” he told the BBC. “Will they be able to apply pre-existing laws to situations that have never come up before?”
He added: “You can also see so many examples of how media is subverted by political institutions in the Potter books and see parallels in the real world.
“Rowling's universe talks a lot about how legal institutions are failing in some scenarios.”
