PEER REVIEW: If Harry Potter Was An Academic Work.

And since I’m mentioning the book, let me repeat a plug for my colleague Ben Barton’s excellent piece from the Michigan Law Review, Harry Potter and the Half-Crazed Bureaucracy. “This partial list of activities brings home just how bleak Rowling’s portrait of government is. The critique is even more devastating because the governmental actors and actions in the book look and feel so authentic and familiar. . . . Lastly, Rowling even eliminates the free press as a check on government power. The wizarding newspaper, The Daily Prophet, is depicted as a puppet to the whims of the Ministry of Magic.”

Well worth the read.