Harry Potter and Legal Scholarship. Give Me A Break!
So what are the law profs up to? Legal analysis of Harry Potter! I kid you not. They are busy in their cubicles thoroughly dissecting, analyzing and cite-checking due process at the Ministry of Magic, according to William McGeveran at Concurring Opinions. And it's not just one article, kind of like a joke or a break from something useful. No, no. This appears to be one of the biggies amongst the law profs.
Check this out, and tell me if you can believe this:
[S]ee Harry Potter and the Half-Crazed Bureaucracy, 104 Mich. L.R. 1523 (2006)). The paper is pretty good (and a great read!) although I think he somewhat overstates the extent to which the Ministry of Magic represents a libertarian-oriented critique of all government. (Without revealing too much about the plot of Book Seven — published after his paper — I think I can say that some of the problems at the Ministry are the work of malicious Death Eaters, not public choice theory. Unless, I suppose, you consider the Death Eaters stand-ins for special interests.
This is what they are putting into law reviews these days. And you wonder why courts no longer cite to law reviews. Can you imagine an appellate court upholding a conviction on the basis of a Ministry of Magic decision? Better yet, would it only be persuasive authority or precedent.
Now I've got nothing against law profs having some fun and messing around once in a while. I'm sure they need a break from the serious just like the rest of us. But publishing this in Law Reviews?
Here's the deal: It's a book. It's not real. It's a figment of J.K.Rawlings imagination. There are real people being put in jail and executed based on erroneous identifications. There are children being abused by a system that was meant to protect them from abuse. There are people whose lives are lost the law can't or won't protect them. Forget the Avada Cadavra curse. It doesn't really work. Save the Law Reviews for real things and maybe they'll be taken more seriously.
And by the way, it's not as difficult to be a law prof as to try a capital case. When we screw up, real people can die. When you screw up, there is regime change at the Ministry of Magic. Get it?
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9/28/2007 7:34 AM
Simple Justice wrote:
I've been writing about law school issues for a while, both because somebody has to call the law profs on some of their sillier ideas as well as helping the future of the legal profession to understand what they are getting into.- 10/13/2007 7:16 AM Simple Justice wrote:
A few days ago, I posted about Ann Coulter's interview by Donny Deutsch.- 10/13/2007 7:17 AM Simple Justice wrote:
A few days ago, I posted about Ann Coulter's interview by Donny Deutsch.- 10/14/2007 8:12 AM Simple Justice wrote:
As regular readers know,- 10/14/2007 8:12 AM Simple Justice wrote:
As regular readers know,- 1/1/2008 8:27 AM Simple Justice wrote:
The conviction of John White for manslaughter for the death of Daniel Cicciaro is an odd subject for an editorial on the first day of the New Year at Newsday.
- 1/1/2008 8:27 AM Simple Justice wrote:
The conviction of John White for manslaughter for the death of Daniel Cicciaro is an odd subject for an editorial on the first day of the New Year at Newsday.
- 1/1/2008 8:28 AM Simple Justice wrote:
The conviction of John White for manslaughter for the death of Daniel Cicciaro is an odd subject for an editorial on the first day of the New Year at Newsday.
- 2/2/2008 8:44 AM Simple Justice wrote:
There's some pretense amongst the Ivory Tower crowd that they are capable of, and it's worth their while, dissecting fiction as if it was something that actually happened.
- 2/2/2008 8:44 AM Simple Justice wrote:
There's some pretense amongst the Ivory Tower crowd that they are capable of, and it's worth their while, dissecting fiction as if it was something that actually happened.
- 3/8/2009 8:59 AM Simple Justice wrote:
Having written of the ugly underbelly of legal academia, and leaving that nasty taste in one's mouth, Kentucky Law School Dean Jim Chen provides the MoneyLaw pepto bismol to sooth the burn.
- 3/8/2009 10:13 PM Simple Justice wrote:
Having written of the ugly underbelly of legal academia, and leaving that nasty taste in one's mouth, Louisville Law School Dean Jim Chen provides the MoneyLaw pepto bismol to sooth the burn.
- 10/13/2007 7:16 AM Simple Justice wrote:
There's a whole bunch of them!
I'm going to start using the Harry Potter defense: "Your Honor, he's a child without parents who is being groomed for a life of fighting evil and along the way has to necessarily kill people to advance the cause of good."
Think it'll fly?
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