Hermione. Was. Stunned. As she looked down at the letter she held in her hands, the bit of her brain still functioning after the information overload was unsure precisely how to classify what she felt at the moment, but thought stunned was a bit of an understatement.
Block by logical block Harry had built up his case against the headmaster. He had taken her seriously when she said she wanted every minute detail; the letter had gone on for ages outlining where his information came from, what he'd seen first-hand, what he suspected, what different individuals had told him, and what Dumbledore himself had corroborated. It must have taken him most of the day to write it.
"Hermione, are you alright?" her father asked from his customary seat at the circular dinner table.
"What?" she asked, not really rousing from the mental surprise attack. She had been so desperate for information she'd ripped open Harry's letter as soon as it arrived. Why had she done it at dinner? Oh, right. She had been so desperate for infor- She shook her head to stop herself from repeating herself.
"Is there something wrong?" her father coaxed, the absence of any joke noting the seriousness with which he was taking this.
She quickly thought back to see if Harry had written anything relationship-like in it before sliding the letter over to him. How could she explain something like what it said when she could barely wrap her head around it? Better to let him read it himself.
As her father's eyebrows sunk lower and lower one thing became absolutely clear: Harry had no excuse for doing shoddy homework anymore. While there was virtually nothing in the way of an introduction, conclusion, or even transition from when he outlined his current legal issues to explaining the longstanding connections between his family, the Weasleys, and Dumbledore but she supposed those could be disregarded since it was a letter and not an essay for school.
And while there were still gaps in what he alleges, and there was still a need for secondary independent sources to support the evidence he already had and to flesh out precisely what went on, and he was still holding things back, particularly with respect to his mysterious 'new friend' that'd somehow led him to Gringotts to uncover all of this, what he had was already pretty damning.
Her mind properly back in gear, Hermione assigned it to do what it had been trained to do: analyze the claim to determine its validity and see what information, if any, she had to refute it. Underlying Harry's allegation was a set of concrete legal assertions that must each be tested in turn and those were what she had to focus on.
One : Harry was born in the magical world to magical parents. According to every credible source and all the available evidence, this statement was undeniably true. Only sources so biased so as to not be credible would point to his mother's nonmagical origin and heritage in an attempt to invalidate this claim, and that was a case of Moving the Goalposts, a logical fallacy which had no place in determining the truth of an argument. The truth remained that Harry's parents were able to perform magic, and had lived in, fought for, and died in the magical world; anything else is immaterial.
Two : Harry never should have been taken to the nonmagical world to live with the Dursleys. This assertion was particularly troublesome since it encompassed so much of everything else and dealt with two areas she knew precious little about: magical law and customs. That this assertion came from Lichfield, a professional and practicing wizarding lawyer who's well versed in both areas, lent credibility to the argument, but Dumbledore, an equally prominent - if not more prominent - member of the legal community obviously had a differing opinion.
On the cultural side of things, Rise and Fall of the Dark Arts did specifically mention it being common practice to send orphans to live with their closest relative during the time in question and implied this had always been the case. Though it was by no means an authoritative legal text, she would feel better after reviewing that section for the specific wording involved to see if there was any implication nonmagical family members were barred from the process.
Knowing now how biased some legal issues were in favor of the "longstanding members of the wizarding community" she thought this might be an application of the lack of Standing nonmagical people had when it came to Inheritance. On their first visit to Gringotts her father had wanted to give her additional money for any mementos she might want to have, as if their trip to Diagon Alley were to some sort of an amusement park. Their teller had made the off-color comment that her parents had better keep the money on them or if she happened to die any money she had on her would simply be lost since they'd be unable to inherit anything she had.
The fact that Harry did go to the nonmagical world logically pointed to some sort of arbitration and official judgment being made. This also seemed to be corroborated by what both Lichfield and Dumbledore said about the issue so it was a pretty safe assumption to make that this probably was the case. Professor Dumbledore said, according to Harry, he'd been appointed by the Minister of Magic. Whether this appointment was the same guardianship, and carried the same legal weight, Harry and Lichfield allege was still unclear.
The appointment could simply mean that Professor Dumbledore, in his role as the head of the Wizengamot, was authorized to determine who should have parental rights to him. If this was the case, and the legal determination was his to make, then he very well could've found in the Dursleys' favor. The fact the Dursleys had never seemed to want him, at least in Harry's account of them, seemed to belie they would've wanted Dumbledore to act on their behalf at all though.
Hermione supposed it was possible the Dursleys had, at first, actually wanted Harry, even if only to access his parents' supposedly considerable wealth, and only later came to resent taking him in once the determination had been made and they'd learned they'd never be able to touch the Potter estate, and therefore treated him poorly because of it. This seemed a logical assumption to make, but only because Professor Dumbledore had used the specific legal term 'Magical Guardian' in his discussion with Harry.
During her visit to inform her family about the magical world in general, and about Hogwarts in particular, Professor McGonagall had explained some of the legal complexities involved with teaching students of nonmagical backgrounds. Though Hogwarts had a long history of acknowledging the authority and role that nonmagical parents had in the lives of their children, a tradition they continued through the issuance of permission slips before special trips or functions, the Ministry of Magic had no such tradition.
The fact remained that, by law, legal authority over an underage person's affairs in the magical world defaulted to the member of the family with the most knowledge of the magical world itself. Since both parent and child are presumed to have the same amount of magical knowledge when a nonmagical family is approached with the truth of the magical world, the appropriate legal authority still rested with the parents themselves. Professor McGonagall had warned this would change though once magical education had begun unless a specific legal fix was adopted: the use of a magical guardian.
By signing their parental authority in magical affairs over to someone with even greater magical knowledge, particularly one in an institution like Hogwarts with their history of deferring to the wishes of nonmagical parents, then as long as their wishes didn't conflict with the best interests of the child those same parents could retain as much authority over their underage children as possible.
So if Professor Dumbledore had granted the Dursleys legal rights to Harry, it's possible they could have signed the remaining magical authority back over to Dumbledore. If that's the case then she was hard pressed to see whether he'd done anything illegal. Hermione wished she could say he'd done nothing wrong but at the very least the headmaster was negligent in his responsibility to ensure that Harry's nonmagical guardians had been treating him properly, and she couldn't see how keeping him ignorant of his wizarding heritage or draining his inheritance was in Harry's best interest when continued contact and good financial stewardship was possible.
The downside of this was that, as far as she knew, magical guardians were only used in cases where the child in question was of nonmagical parents. She supposed it could equally apply here and while all this made logical sense to her she had to acknowledge she lacked the specific grounding to know if it made any legal sense. She simply didn't have enough information to make a determination one way or the other.
While she'd love for Harry to be free to enjoy his life in the manner he saw fit and to reclaim everything he was entitled to, she didn't want to think so poorly of Professor Dumbledore. Well-meaning but negligent, or perhaps unintentionally ignorant of any "mismanagement" on behalf of the Dursleys or this Gropegold, either due to overwork or spreading himself too thin, was one thing but intentional nefarious intent was something completely different.
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