Mooting Madness

This past week has been pretty odd. I'd expected that I'd have quite a little bit of work to do, but I hadn't anticipated quite how said work would come about.

I entered last weekend with the knowledge that the deadline for submitting our finished mooting submissions was Sunday 14th, which, although they weren't near being finished, was plenty of time to get things in order. So naturally I wasn't pushing that hard to get them finished.

Unfortunately, on Monday afternoon my knowledge was 'updated to '. The deadline wasn't Sunday the 14th, it was instead Wednesday 10th. Panic. So cursing my rather laid back attitude of the days before I had a manic couple of days trying to get everything finished in time; concluding, proof-reading, footnoting, formatting, cross referencing, indexing etc. Thankfully my team got everything done with about two and a half hours left to go. Unfortunately the other team did not, and it was actions stations right up to the deadline to get theirs done. In fact it was action stations until \after the deadline, with us finally being two minutes late. I don't think I've ever worked so hard in a few hours to get them all finished. I summed it up at the end by commenting "That was rather fun, in a sort of sadistic 'I don't want to ever have to that again' kind of way."

The fantastic thing about the whole thing is that I've now finished the written work for my moot a whole weekend before I thought I would, which given my general loathing of the whole thing, is brilliant! They are now all printed and stapled and they look quite professional if nothing else. Unfortunately I had to pay €135 for the privilege because the University isn't sure if it's going to pay for them. As far as I'm concerned though, it is.

After all of this we had to take our printed submissions and march off to The Hague to 'present ourselves' to the competition organisers. So, suited and booted off we trotted expecting something quite formal. Alas, not only were we the only team in suits, our submissions also looked the shabbiest, there was no 'presenting' in any shape or form, and the whole thing lasted less than an hour. We were told what we already knew, had to endue a painful 'lottery' system to determine who we were to moot against, and weren't really given the chance to talk to each other properly as we can't know which University each team is representing. They didn't even give us lunch, to everyone's disappointment. And it was raining and blowing a hooley. Not that positive an experience really!

So, that was essentially my week up until yesterday, and consequently provides my excuse for not writing a blog entry before now. I have several other things to mention as well, but to boost my post count, I shall post these separately!