The Wizengamot and related bodies

[sunnyskywalker]

I've been trying to figure out how the wizarding legislative/judicial branch works, with little luck. In a way, this is actually realistic; anyone who's ever tried to sort through how the various commissions and committees and departments and offices and programs etc. of a large government are related has probably had similar moments of bafflement. But I'd still like a semi-coherent picture of the government of wizarding Britain.

We know that the Wizengamot passes laws, so they're sometimes a parliament (apparently unicameral). But they also apparently act as the highest court. Being tried by "the full Wizengamot" is a big deal.

So far, so good. But here the neat Wizarding Branches of Government for Kids version breaks down.

In OotP, Harry is tried before the full Wizengamot. There are about 50 of them, wearing purple robes with big Ws on them. In GoF, he witnesses three memories of trials and trial sentencings. Karkaroff's is a closed trial, so we can probably assume that everyone on the benches is involved in the trial somehow. There are about 200 of them, and they're not noted as wearing official Wizengamot robes (which would be noticeable). Dumbledore refers to them as "this council," and it seems to be the Council of Magical Law. Then at Bagman's trial, there's mention of "the jury" to Crouch's right, as opposed to the spectators on other sides of the room.

If the Wizengamot is the highest court, why were those three important trials tried before the Council of Magical Law? (Gosh, Harry must really rate high on the threat-meter!) And why is the Council four times bigger than the Wizengamot? How exactly are the Wizengamot and the Council of Magical Law related? Is the Council composed of the full Wizengamot (not in their W robes, since they're not acting solely as the Wizengamot) plus 150-ish other people--and who are those people? Are "the jury" at Bagman's trial the Council (crammed onto one side of the room to make room for spectators), the Wizengamot, or a jury from yet another source?

Looking at the characters whose identities we know makes things even more puzzling. In the 1980s trials, the DMLE head (Crouch) acts as judge and chief prosecutor. At Harry's trial, the Minister for Magic (Fudge) takes on that role. Maybe the Minister is the official highest prosecutor-judge, but may delegate the job to the DMLE head? Or maybe the Minister is the prosecutor-judge for the Wizengamot, but the DMLE head holds that role for the Council?

And the presence of both of those officials means there isn't a sharp division between the legislative/judicial and the executive branches. This impression is reinforced by the initial trial plan for Harry, in which the DMLE head (Bones) was going to hear his case privately in her office. Are most trials handled by DMLE officials? Are medium-sized trials handled by a small panel of DMLE and/or Wizengamot and/or Council members? (Like, there's the Murder Panel, the Arson Panel, the Apparating Without A License Panel...) Oh, and we also hear that the Muggle Protection Act is "Arthur's law," even though he's an office head and not on the Wizengamot. Did he write it and get a Wizengamot member to propose it for him? Can department and office heads propose legislation directly?

Also, we see that DMLE head Amelia Bones is a member of the Wizengamot. She and Senior Undersecretary Dolores Umbridge sit next to Fudge and help question Harry. Are all high Ministry officials--department heads, the senior undersecretary, and the Minister--automatically granted seats on the Wizengamot, or did they acquire the positions separately? How many government positions can you hold concurrently?

In the 1980s trials, Dumbledore and Moody are sitting next to Crouch on the highest bench, but not asking any questions. Are they supposed to be his backups for interrogating the defendants? If so, why are they acting as the peanut gallery instead of doing their job? If the Chief Warlock of the Wizengamot is one of the people eligible for that role (only for the Council, or for Wizengamot trials as well?), maybe Dumbledore wouldn't have been on the bench in OotP even if he were still Chief Warlock because he was acting as Harry's barrister instead (which evidently they don't normally have). And Moody had retired by OotP, so he wouldn't be there as the Auror Office's representative. (Was there another Auror there, like Scrimgeor, and Harry just didn't notice? Do they only get a representative on the Council of Magical Law, but not Wizengamot trials?) I don't think Moody was ever confirmed as the head of the Office, so either that person delegated the job to Moody, or they can pick who gets to be Auror representative. Or maybe Dumbledore and Moody are just so important that they can demand to watch any trials they want from the best seat?

Also, there's always the possibility of procedural changes between 1982 and 1995, just to make things more complicated.

Given that the DMLE head seems to be a hair's breadth from being literally the wizarding world's judge, jury, and executioner, it's no wonder we got a would-be despot like Crouch. The power structure positively encourages it. I mean, the guy was effectively the Chief Justice and the Commander in Chief! At the same time! And maybe had legislative powers too! How do they expect that to work out?

And we also never hear anyone comment that there should have been any legal impediment to Crouch trying and sentencing his own son. They really don't have any sense of conflict of interest, do they?

Anyway. The Wizengamot, the Council of Magical Law, and the executive departments: does anyone have ideas on how to sort out this tangle?

Comments

[sunnyskywalker]

Well, unfortunately, we don't have much solid information, and whatever hypotheses we come up with have to allow the examples we see to fit somewhere. Arthur says Harry's trial is unusual, not that it's procedurally incorrect, for instance, so however the government is structured, it must allow for the Minister to preside over the Wizengamot to prosecute a teenager for performing magic in a Muggle area and for the DMLE head to try him one-on-one in her office.

According to Hagrid, the Ministry "mostly" spends their time keeping magic secret from Muggles. This is Hagrid, so we should allow for some exaggeration. We also know that Arthur's office--which you would think would be important under that mission statement--is staffed by only two people and treated as a joke. They also have offices for internal wizarding-world things, like the Floo network and the Department of Mysteries. So it's hard to say exactly how much they focus on hiding magic vs. other governmental tasks. A very important task being simply to keep existing, if parallels to real governments help. I can see one goal being "employ witches and wizards who might otherwise not have jobs in our screwy closed economy," which might explain the Ministry's size, but not necessarily its organization.

According to Pottermore, the Ministry was founded in 1707, and was derived from the earlier Wizards' Council, which may or may not have also been called the Wizengamot. If not, then there was a Wizards' Council and a Wizengamot simultaneously for some time, and we're not sure what distinguished them. It looks like they kept the Wizengamot in some fashion and spun off some of their authority into the Ministry departments in 1707. Maybe.

I'm not sure how helpful looking at Muggle governments would be. I'm pretty sure that random mid-level employees in the British Ministry of Defense, for example, can't waltz into Parliament and propose legislation, and that this isn't a new development. Parliament has been bicameral since the 14th century or so. Evidently they could act as the highest court of appeal until recently--but none of the trials that we see are appeals, as far as we know. Harry's wasn't. The Privy Council was not several times larger than Parliament, nor was the Star Chamber, as I recall. (Though the Star Chamber looks like it has some potential here.) We don't know of any ecclesiastical authorities in the Wizengamot, unlike Parliament. I don't know how close a parallel you can find, really. Maybe someone more familiar with the ins and outs of English political history over the last thousand years can help?

You might be able to make something fit by picking the way bits of English government worked in different time periods and sticking them together, but that doesn't help us guess which bits to pick. And then grafting that to a modern Ministry setup with departments, divisions, and offices which send out memos makes you think you should be looking later in history, not earlier.

[chantaldormand]

"Unusual trial" might mean that a minor's case being treated like that is not normal, but then again Harry is a celebrity. If your local Justin Beiber is going around breaking law "just because" (let's be honest, during peace time probability of Dementor attack in muggle town is next to none) then you have to deal with him quickly otherwise you end up with copycats.

Arthur's office deals only with enchanted muggle objects. Other than his office we have Aurors who deal with idiots who curse muggles, Creature Control office who deals with potentially rampaging creatures and Oblivation teams who erase memories. And those are only departments I can name of top of my head so there are potentially more.
Heck Arthur's house potentially falls under some department other than his.
Not to mention that Cornelius Fudge apparently started out as an Oblivator, so this is very much viable career patch :P

I asked about governments contemporary to MOM for a very simple reason: governments like to borrow solutions tested by other governments. Not to mention that WW is very backwards. So taking a look on British gov and it's neighbours might give us some kind of clue.
Not to mention that Jo is British and as such she probably used past and present British gov to create MOM :P

[sunnyskywalker]

There's still a difference between "unusual" and "outside normal rules entirely." Harry's seems to be unusual in getting bumped up to the highest level for a first offense, but no one protests "but they never try cases like this before the full Wizengamot!" So, their laws and procedures allow that possibility. And the possibility of the head of an executive department handling it one-on-one. And possibly other options in between. That's what I mean by the structure having to accommodate these cases--they're uncommon but still within the rules. So what are those rules?

Enchanted Muggle artifacts can and do cause a lot of trouble (just imagine how many people could have seen Sirius flying around on his motorcycle back in the day), so why just two people? Do they only have two people rounding up magical creatures? Only two Obliviators? If they staffed Arthur's office better, they probably wouldn't need as many Obliviators in the first place, because they'd retrieve the enchanted items before so many people encountered them! Which would better fulfill a "keep magic secret" mission. But they are oddly cavalier about their supposed main reason for existence. See also: keeping multiple Muggle campground owners around and Obliviating them ten times a day instead of arranging holidays for them while new "temporary assistant managers" run things for them.

I agree that the Ministry probably draws from British precedents, but the question is which ones. The British government has changed a lot over the centuries. And given how the rest of the wizarding world draws from different Muggle periods simultaneously (actual torches on the walls, but also a modern school calendar), the government probably does as well. So which bits did they pick, and how did they fit them together?

[chantaldormand]

Well yeah, enchanted muggle objects could cause a lot of problems, but how many wizards do something like enchanting motorbike to fly? Majority of Arthur's job are mean spirited people who do small stuff like shrinking keys. In other words stuff that can be explained away via non-magical means. "Darn I lost my keys again!" "Those stupid teenagers are exploding toilets again?".

There is also other answer to this problem: Arthur accidentally undermines his own job.
MOM seems to pay his department in peanuts so Arthur is encouraged to take bribes. For what he takes bribes? Well for cleaning the mess aka writing incident report in such way that nobody could point fingers at his patron. Probably by making it seem as it was non-magical accident that looked like it involved magic. Those silly muggles!
So if Arthur keeps viable incident reports down, MOM thinks that Arthur's dep. do not need so much funding...
It's a vicious circle.

Now, I know that we cannot depend on how historically British government was shaped. Especially since Jo's understanding of politics is very flawed.

[sunnyskywalker]

More on the government over time:

England had a Treasury (Department) centuries before the Statute of Secrecy, and a Chancellor of the Exchequer to manage a lot of the financial stuff, like taxation. But it looks like it wasn't until after the SoS that the Lord High Treasurer was established as de facto Prime Minister, and longer for that to be more official. Also, the Ministry for Magic wasn't created until 1707.

So, if they intended to be a separate or mostly-separate magical government from the beginning, you'd expect there to be a Treasury and a Magical Chancellor of the Exchequer. And the goblins were rebelling in the 17th century, so I doubt they would have given those functions to the goblins. It would make sense for the position to develop into the Minister for Magic in the new Ministry (roughly parallel to the Muggle version), because the money guy distributing funds to the secrecy-enforcing departments is effectively in charge of a big part of one of their major government concerns. But then we'd expect to hear people complain about Fudge's budget allocating all the money to the Department of International Magical Cooperation and shorting the DMLE or vice versa, even if we didn't hear his other title. But no one ever talks about Fudge's budget.

If they didn't intend to be quite so separate (like, they planned that the real Treasury would fund them, so they didn't need to duplicate it), they've most likely become separated enough since then that they need to replicate some financial handling functions in the MoM now. If this developed after they'd started using very bland, modern department structure names, it could well have gotten stuck as a subordinate office somewhere unexpected with a name much less noticeable than "Treasury" or "Exchequer." (We know they are influenced by Muggle developments, because they use the Muggle school calendar. And their departmental organization sounds very modern--no fancy, memorable titles like Lord High Beatdown-Giver or whatever.) Maybe just the Minister's Office of Budget and Finance, though that would take us back to asking why no one complains about Fudge's budget. Idk, maybe the Department of Mysteries handles it. That would make as much sense as anything.

Anyway, we can't guess which way it turned out (could be another version entirely) based on what we know. Though if they have a Treasury, it's probably in a different building, or you need to take a special elevator to get there. But this shows how hard it is to guess which eras they draw from in their government generally, and in what combination. There are precedents, but there's no exact match to one single era. Is the DMLE head a rough equivalent to the Lord High Chancellor, e.g.? If so, from which century? And they have weird factors like instantaneous transportation which probably make their setup deviate even further from their Muggle counterparts.

So it's not so much about trying to find "a" parallel as trying to find several and see if they can mesh and also reasonably fit what we see.

[chantaldormand]

//But no one ever talks about Fudge's budget.//

I wonder, in this setting does Fudge have any control over budget? Sure he seems to send Dementors and Dolores to Hogwarts, but perhaps he does it via convincing Wizengamont?

/Idk, maybe the Department of Mysteries handles it. That would make as much sense as anything./

Considering how Jo is mystified by numbers I wouldn't be surprised :D