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Who Wants To Be A Muggle? The Diminished Legitimacy Of Law As Magic, Mark Edwin Burge
Who Wants To Be A Muggle? The Diminished Legitimacy Of Law As Magic, Mark Edwin Burge
Faculty Scholarship
In the Harry Potter world, the magical population lives among the non-magical Muggle population, but we Muggles are largely unaware of them. This secrecy is by elaborate design and is necessitated by centuries-old hostility to wizards by the non-magical majority. The reasons behind this hostility, when combined with the similarities between Harry Potter-stylemagic and American law, make Rowling’s novels into a cautionary tale for the legal profession that it not treat law as a magic unknowable to non-lawyers. Comprehensibility — as a self-contained, normative value in the enactment interpretation, and practice of law — is given short-shrift by the legal …