Regarding the Statute of Secrecy (Harry Potter):

[The Romulan Republic]

Its interesting that the poll showed that only fifty percent were in favour of loosening or abolishing. And this is on a board in the real world. Imagine how wizards whose society would change massively if the Statute of Secrecy ended might feel about it.

Reform would likely be terribly unpopular if not done gradually (and maybe even then). You would need a very popular and strong-willed politician who was prepared to put principles ahead of his own career and even his safety to sell this. In other words, you'd basically need Minister Harry Potter.

[The Romulan Republic]

A fairly big thing would be if the Ministry used better magic detection.

Their existing system sucks, to put it mildly, and improving it would not be that hard. Voldemort put his title under Taboo and saying it both alerted hunters of the location of the speaker and disabled defensive magic in the proximities of the Speaker.

Making certain incantations Taboo (maybe not Imperio, because that would result in an hilarious number of false positives thanks to Spanish speakers, but certainly Avada Kedavra) would go a long way towards containing magical crime.

Maybe the Taboo spell was some sort of Dark Magic. And maybe it was something Voldemort invented so only he could do it.

The thought of being able to instantly located anyone who cast a killing curse, for example, is appealing. On the other hand, what about situations where someone is reading a book that contains it or discussing it in training/a classroom or something like that? Plus you're talking about almost criminalizing a word, which could be seen as a free speech problem (though the Wizarding World is different from ours' in that words can be used to kill people).

[Eternal_Freedom]

The thought of being able to instantly located anyone who cast a killing curse, for example, is appealing. On the other hand, what about situations where someone is reading a book that contains it or discussing it in training/a classroom or something like that? Plus you're talking about almost criminalizing a word, which could be seen as a free speech problem (though the Wizarding World is different from ours' in that words can be used to kill people).

That's easily solved, most everyone refers to it as "The killing curse" rather than actually saying the incantation. Probably for exactly that reason, to avoid scaring the hell out of people who might happen to hear you.

[Murazor]

Maybe the Taboo spell was some sort of Dark Magic. And maybe it was something Voldemort invented so only he could do it.

Even assuming that this is the case, unless the Taboo involved literal human sacrifice, the potential legitimate uses of the ability would justify at least some research into trying to recreate it.

On the other hand, what about situations where someone is reading a book that contains it or discussing it in training/a classroom or something like that? Plus you're talking about almost criminalizing a word, which could be seen as a free speech problem (though the Wizarding World is different from ours' in that words can be used to kill people).

There are few enough decent reasons to utter the incantation of the Killing Curse, so I think that the average wizard would be fine with criminalizing those specific words, broadly under the same reasoning that leads to the ban on hate speech/death threats and all that kind of thing.

[The Romulan Republic]

Maybe they could set up something like the detection of underage magic, only instead of altering the Ministry when you perform magic, it alerts the Ministry when you perform an Unforgivable Curse only.

[Simon_Jester]

On the other hand, what about situations where someone is reading a book that contains it or discussing it in training/a classroom or something like that? Plus you're talking about almost criminalizing a word, which could be seen as a free speech problem (though the Wizarding World is different from ours' in that words can be used to kill people).

There are few enough decent reasons to utter the incantation of the Killing Curse, so I think that the average wizard would be fine with criminalizing those specific words, broadly under the same reasoning that leads to the ban on hate speech/death threats and all that kind of thing.

At the very least it would be easy to investigate casual usage of the words that are part of the incantations to forbidden spells. If it turns out that the words "Avada Kedavra" were spoken by a careless Defense professor who was describing the killing curse to his students as part of a normal and reasonable lesson...

...Just don't press charges. And write exemptions into the laws for such things. There's no reason to willfully make the laws stupid.

[Zaune]

...Just don't press charges. And write exemptions into the laws for such things. There's no reason to willfully make the laws stupid.

But then how would the Department of Magical Law Enforcement be able to meet their "clearance" targets and thus avoid getting their budget slashed?

[The Romulan Republic]

This is the Wizarding World's law enforcement we're talking about. Stupidity and corruption are to be expected.