Roger Williams University Law Review Volume 11 | Issue 2 Article 2 Winter 2006 Harry Potter and the Unforgivable Curses: Norm- formation, Inconsistency, and the Rule of Law in the Wizarding World Aaron Schwabach Thomas Jefferson School of Law Follow this and additional works at: http://docs.rwu.edu/rwu_LR Recommended Citation Schwabach, Aaron (2006) "Harry Potter and the Unforgivable Curses: Norm-formation, Inconsistency, and the Rule of Law in the Wizarding World," Roger Williams University Law Review: Vol. 11: Iss. 2, Article 2. Available at: http://docs.rwu.edu/rwu_LR/vol11/iss2/2 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Journals at DOCS@RWU. It has been accepted for inclusion in Roger Williams University Law Review by an authorized administrator of DOCS@RWU. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Articles Harry Potter and the Unforgivable Curses: Norm-formation, Inconsistency, and the Rule of Law in the Wizarding World Aaron Schwabacht I. INTRODUCTION The Big Thing in popular literature in the 1980s and the early 1990s was cyberpunk, and academics loved it:1 Neuromancer2 was dark. It was serious. It dripped Weltschmerz from every page. But the essential nihilism of the genre, so delightful to cultural scholars, offered little for lawyers. No one could have predicted, back then, that the Next Big t Professor of Law, Thomas Jefferson School of Law. J.D., 1989, Boalt Hall; B.A., 1985, Antioch College,
[email protected]. I'd like to thank my daughters Veronica and Jessica Schwabach, my sisters Karen and Jennifer Schwabach, and my wife Qienyuan Zhou for their patience with this project and many long discussions on arcane points of Potter lore, and I'd especially like to thank Jeffrey Thomas for coming up with the whole mad scheme in the first place and seeing it through.