All the Harry Potter fans at Kolkata’s National University of Juridical Sciences (NUJS) now have an academic approach to their interest. The University is offering a new course based on the Harry Potter book weaved by JK Rowling.

Assistant Professor Shouvik Kumar Guha has now formulated and penned down a course for the 4th and 5th-year B.A. L.L.B(Hon.) students of NUJS  as an elective that will focus and explore the legal aspects of the famous best selling J.K.Rowling’s Harry Potter, as reported by The Telegraph.

“This course is meant to be more of an experiment. It will take both the students and me out of our comfort zones,” Shouvik Kumar Guha told The Telegraph.

Harry’s world has some similarities with our world

The course-An interface between Fantasy Fiction Literature and Law: Special focus on Rowling’s Potterverse- will start in December. The course has an intake of  40 students. Even though there is a month left for the course to start, it has already filled its capacity. The course is expected to include a total of 45 hours of discussion-based teaching, as reported by the BBC.

While speaking to the Quartz India, Guha mentioned how laws and institutions described in Harry Potter would help future lawyers and legal experts to deal with real-life scenarios. He further added , “If you look into the Harry Potter universe, there are a lot of views about the limitations of law and institutions, and it talks about a lot of things: an undemocratic form of government, a judiciary that is not independent, citizens being deprived of due process of law, and so on and so forth. There are many scenarios with which allegorical situations can be found in the real world.”

The course at the Kolkata university will focus on legal traditions and institutions, including the bureaucracy of the “Ministry of Magic”; crimes and punishments, notably the “Unforgivable Curses” and the “Wizengamot Trials”; social values, and class rights, especially the marginalisation of “Werewolves,” “Giants,” “Centaurs,” “Mudbloods,” and “Squibs” , according to Quartz India.

Other Universities with similar courses

Even before NUJS, several universities have already started courses inspired by Harry Potter.

Durham University started a module called, Harry Potter and the Age of Illusion in the year 2010. The course was for 70 undergraduates under the Education Studies BA degree.  

Even before this, Yale University also started a course- Christian Theology and Harry Potter- in 2008.  The course was structured to examine Christian themes such as sin, evil and resurrection. While speaking to, CNN, Danielle Tumminio, the instructor for Yale’s Harry Potter course had said, “It was a struggle for me as I put the class together, because I knew if I didn’t construct this well … then a lot of what I was doing would be missed or misconstrued. I certainly didn’t want to come across as someone trying to indoctrinate my students,”.

The Logical Indian Take

B.A.L.L.B is said to be one of the highly academic course, an addition as such would be a great academic call to not only engage students but also to make an understanding of real-life situation easy and relatable. Harry Potter in a law class. It is definitely the treat ‘muggles’ were looking for!

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