IT MIGHT sound like fantasy but a top university in India is offering a law course on the world’s most famous wizard, Harry Potter.

Yes, a real law course on the world’s most famous wizard. And no the school is not called Hogwarts.

West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences (NUJS) in Kolkata will begin teaching students the rules of the Potterverse in December but it will not focus on magic.

Rather it will focus on the parallels between our world and the one created by J.K. Rowling and how our rule of law (or more specifically Indian rule of law) applies to the fictional world of wizardry.

Professor Shouvik Kumar Guha, who created the course, An Interface Between Fantasy Fiction Literature and Law: Special focus on Rowling’s Potterverse, chose the fictional world because of the themes that run throughout the books and how they mirror many of the issues affecting modern society.

He also said it was an experiment to encourage creative thinking.

“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,” Professor Guha told Quartz. “There’s many scenarios with which allegorical situations can be found in the real world.”

Those situations are detailed in the course’s curriculum.

Students will have to grapple topics such as legal traditions and institutions, including liberty and the rule of law in a magical society, and bureaucracy in the ministry of magic; unforgivable curses, Wizengamot trials, the innocence of Sirius Black and the persecution of Tom Riddle as well as explore social values, identity and class rights as seen in the enslavement of house elves or the marginalisation of werewolves, giants and centaurs.

They will also study Quidditch and how sports law applies at Hogwarts.

“In our current system, we simply tell students the black letter of law,” Mr Guha told the BBC.

“Will they be able to apply pre-existing laws to situations that have never come up before?

“You can also see so many examples of how media is subverted by political institutions in the Potter books and see parallels in the real world.

“[Harry Potter author JK] Rowling’s universe talks a lot about how legal institutions are failing in some scenarios.”

And while the university is the first to offer a law course on the Potterverse, there are other institutions that allows students to study Harry Potter.

Durham university in the UK is believed to have been the first to offer a Harry Potter-themed course while several universities in the US including Yale offered Potter-themed theological courses.