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]

Also weird: no one ever, and I mean ever, mentions taxes. None of the rich purebloods complain about not inheriting as much as they wanted because of death duties. Fred's death duties don't imperil the joke shop's finances. No one accuses Lucius Malfoy or anyone else of hiding money in offshore accounts to avoid taxes. The Quibbler doesn't say Fudge and/or the goblins are involved in shady tax dealings. This is weird. If there are taxes, there are people loudly complaining about taxes, and we never saw a single one. Heck, in the Muggle world, trying to tax whiskey caused at least one armed rebellion!

I can explain that away by saying the wizarding world doesn't have any taxes because they fund their operations entirely by mooching off Muggle sources: embezzling money from the Muggle government, investing in the stock market, renting their vast number of real estate holdings to Muggles...

But even with an explanation, that causes a significant divergence from Muggle governments, making parallels less useful. As I recall, there were at least a few centuries when Parliament mainly gathered whenever the king needed them to get him more money somehow. Modern governments also spend a lot of time on taxes and other fiscal matters. Not having that to argue about would change things, and I'm not sure I can predict all the ramifications.

Also, even with no taxes, they also don't seem to have any governmental agency dedicated to finance, which is downright bizarre. No Treasury Department? No Department of Finance? No Controller of Currency? What do they do, just get the money, hand it out to departments based on handshake agreements, and let them spend it however? Really? No, I can't buy it. Do they keep the money-related bodies in a building other than the Ministry, so Harry didn't hear them on the elevator's departmental roll call?

Even so, you'd think government spending would come up. Allegations that not all the money allocated to the Quidditch World Cup really went where it was supposed to, for instance. Complaints that look, Quidditch is great, but the Department of Magical Sports is sucking up the entire budget for 1993/94, plus a lot of employees, and the rest of them still have work to do! Rita could have claimed Dumbledore was doing something shady with the Hogwarts accounts--and she might have been correct for all we know.

The more you look at it, the weirder it gets. Real people can't shut up about how the government is handling money. Are wizards a different species after all?

Not having a standing army was the historical norm until recent centuries, which fits with their keeping some pre-Secrecy traditions which the Muggle world has abandoned--but adopting others. They differ from many historical Muggle governments in having a (national) standing police force, which also acted as the military if you count their "wars" as actual civil wars rather than organized crime conflicts or something like that. We don't know if they have a way of calling up an army if they go to war with wizarding France.

[chantaldormand]

Let's take a step back.

The tax thing? Governments have many ways of taxing it's citizens. You can tax earnings, donations, goods, services, import etc. Considering how isolated the WW in Britain is, I wouldn't be surprised if they place a high import tax to protect local business. In fact it would fit with XVIII/XIX economic philosophy.
Then again we are reading books from Harry's perspective AKA guy who until POA didn't know that magical police=Aurors so it's hard to talk about taxes :P

Finances Dep. might be rolled into another one, heck Undersecretary's job might be overseeing employees who deal with finances.
The thing is you cannot assume things just by hearing the name of department. For example in my current place of employment out H&S dep. not only deals with health and safety hazards, but also negotiates medical contracts (in my country you have to have your health checked before you start working and it's paid by your employer) and deals with invoices concerning medical examination. That is not normal.

Heck considering that apparently wizards let goblins create their coin, in fact goblins might run finances. After all Harry never listens to HoM lectures and Bins seems to be really fond of goblins.

The complains about public spending? Again that depends on how law is written. Spendings might be published like in US; you in theory know how much US spends on military, but good luck on getting in-depth knowledge how much the military spend on each project. If this was my country I would protest, but from XVIII/XIX century perspective? Yeah, you won't find much of riots.

As for police, we are dealing with armed society. Even an eleven year old child could kill so I allow a leeway here.

[sunnyskywalker]

Harry never runs into the problem of having withdrawn X amount for school supplies and ice cream based on the prices and then finding out his ice cream budget has to go toward sales taxes. They might be only taxing alcoholic drinks stronger than butterbeer or other things he never buys, but it doesn't seem like most things have a sales tax as a matter of course. Steep import taxes are a possibility, but how much do they import? They must import some cauldrons or Percy woudln't be writing reports about cauldron-bottom regulations, but we don't know how much overall, so we can't guess how much revenue that would bring in. (Incidentally, if import taxes are very steep and yet it's still profitable to import foreign cauldrons, no wonder Percy is investigating shoddy manufacturing standards. They must be making them awfully thin to cut costs.)

Payroll taxes are also possible, since Harry never draws a salary and wouldn't know... but then I would expect to hear a Weasley or two complain about how Arthur's salary would support them so much more comfortably if only taxes weren't so high. Or someone, somewhere would. Because when the money is coming directly out of your paycheck, real people talk about that a lot. Same with inheritance taxes--the Malfoys ought to be whining about that day and night if they lost a big chunk of cash when Abraxas died, and Sirius might have had trouble affording that Firebolt after the estate paid for the deaths of Orion, Walburga, and Arcturus.

I think leeching off the Muggle world in some way is probably the main revenue source, based only on the fact that wizards generally leech off the Muggle world for so many other things (campgrounds, Muggle-built townhouses in London, trains and train stations...) But at least some of it may be more or less legitimate, if they are renting out real estate they've acquired over the centuries or something like that. And that would definitely make it more likely that wizards wouldn't spend half their time complaining about taxes, legislating about taxes, and the rest.

Oh, and I suspect there was plenty of complaining about taxes in the 18th and 19th centuries. It's just that a lot of it wasn't written down. Plus, it was harder to access information in general, but the wizarding world has had instantaneous communication for ages and would have different expectations based on that.

[oryx_leucoryx]

FYI, in some countries that are not the USA, taxes on items you purchase are included in the price, so you have no idea what proportion of what you pay is the tax.

[chantaldormand]

As Oryx mentioned tax policies in US are not norm worldwide. In fact in EU in most shops you won't find pre-tax price visible next to the product. In case there is visible pre-tax price, it's put next to post-tax price. This is because usually taxation is the same in the whole country

They at least have to import potion ingredients: as far as we can tell, there is no dragon farm/sanctuary, yet there is no shortage of dragon parts in Diagonal Alley.

IMHO Percy's job might be similar to what EU officials do. I do remember that a few years ago that to counter mass import of bananas from Africa they made regulation on how bend bananas must be to be sold in EU.
So yeah cauldron craftsmanship might be shoddy or local British guild was making fuss :P

Well inherence taxes are problems if you don't know where to look for loop holes. I like to imagine that Lucius pays quite well whoever advices him on legal and financial matters. Arthur on the other hand, could have got a decent dowry from Molly's family, but we have seem how well they manage their finances, so I wouldn't be surprised if he was slapped silly by taxes.
And Harry only hangs out with Weasleys and Hermione- people who suck at finances and girl who is supported by her upper-middle class parents.

As for Sirius? In all honesty his accounts should be frozen since he is a criminal on run, so I think he at least had to bribe goblins so he could access his account.

[sunnyskywalker]

Given how Sirius handles his bank account in PoA, I think we'd have to add an extra step: he had Crookshanks bribe the goblins for him. It's no wonder everyone thought that cat had to be an Animagus. He steals passwords, places orders through owl post, bribes goblins... is he the current Hogwarts accountant? He's probably more qualified than just about anyone else in the wizarding world!

I've heard Brits complain about VAT (value-added tax). Mainly shopkeepers and pub owners rather than customers, but the wizarding world is so small that if they were complaining about magic VAT, everyone would know about it. Maybe even the Weasleys want to think they're "above" the tawdry business of trade? Hm, that actually might work, at least halfway.

Some kind of tax must be relevant to Percy's troublesome imported cauldrons somehow, I think, even if as a proposed solution rather than the original problem. "Shoddy imported cauldrons? Well, the guild has been saying these knock-offs are killing their business anyway--we can make them happy, protect British wizarding jobs, and protect the public! Yay, us!" That's probably how Percy concludes his report, only with more polysyllabic words and passive voice.

[chantaldormand]

Now I want Crookshanks as protagonist. Even if he sleeps 18 hours per day he still would be more interesting main character :P
IMHO from my experience poor people do not talk about money, especially with children around. Heck my family is middle-class and my parents didn’t like discussing finances with us. They only started talking about taxes and economy once I was near getting my bachelors degree, so Arthur and especially Molly not talking around kids about money? Believable.

[sunnyskywalker]

Hm, interesting. My experience has been different. I mean, not talking about exactly how much money the family doesn't have at the moment, yes. That would be too shameful, and pretending even to the kids that you're not poor (just prudent or some other code word) sounds familiar. But complaining about the high price of X or the government's fiscal policy in general? Trading tips on saving and/or making more money? Making sure the kids dress "properly" (i.e., don't look poor) and telling them which careers they think offer the most stable paychecks? How to plan so that you might actually be able to retire someday? All that and more, openly. My relatives from poor backgrounds were only half-joking when they said that the first time, people foolishly marry for love, but the second time, they should wise up and marry for money.

Crookshanks probably has so many interesting adventures when no one's looking. He's definitely cleverer than half the human characters at least. Crookshanks for Dark Lord! Or Headmaster! Minister! He could do literally any of those jobs better than the humans with those titles.