Cordelia Ashcroft
Description
A narrow, upright woman past seventy, in plum robes with the silver W, who sits very still and writes almost nothing down. She looks at whoever is speaking and keeps looking after they have stopped.
Personality
Fair, and entirely without warmth toward adults, which people consistently mistake for hostility. She reserves what temper she has for people who waste the court's time or cut corners with its procedure, and she has no interest in being liked.
Children are another matter. With a child in the dock she softens visibly: she leans forward, uses first names, and looks for the reading of events that sends them home.
Background
A Wizengamot elder of long standing who takes the small disciplinary hearings nobody else wants, on the view that the minor courts are where injustice actually happens and that somebody serious ought to be sitting in them. She presided through the post-war trials and was one of the few who came out of that period with her reputation improved.
Story
She presides over the party's hearing at the Hogsmeade Halloween sitting.
Poisoned at her desk during the recess in Session 17 - The Court Sits, before she could give her ruling.