10/04/2007

Mooting all over the World

Well, not quite, but perhaps against the whole world. Last week we travelled to Washington DC to take part in the International Round of the Jessup Mooting competition bringing to an end seven months of blood, sweat, tears and one or two tantrums. But despite my constant complaining along the way, it was all worth it in the end.

Our team was made up of four people, with two of us taking one side of the case, and the other two, the other side. On Monday through Wednesday we had the preliminary rounds to see who would get through to the final twenty-four with each sub-team mooting twice. Fajar and I came up against teams from Indonesia and India, while Yu and Emma had Colombia and Russia.


Things went quite well and Fajar and I won against the teams we mooted against. It probably helped that I ended up with two British judges as Presidents in both my rounds - one being a pretty spectacular Scottish actor/barrister. But we didn't think we'd done well enough to make it into the final rounds so we had our "It's all over" meeting and dinner and patted ourselves on our back before belatedly going to the announcement event. So, we were all caught slightly by surprise to hear that Team 163 - The Netherlands had made it through! The upshot was that we made it through to the final rounds, the downside being that as Yu and Emma would be mooting, it fell to Fajar and I to spend the whole night reading the submissions from the other side. The first-time I've pulled anything approaching an all-nighter for work purposes! Unfortunately we lost to Queensland who went onto the semi-finals, so there was no shame in that and our final placing was 19th out of about 100 teams - much better than we were expecting. We thought that would be it, but at the final evening party it turned out that we'd also written the 9th best submissions and that as a result we'd been entered into the best orallist competition as well, and that I'd placed 2nd! So all in all a fantastic week of surprises and beaten-expectations!


And I even found the time to moot to John Adams, a rather deceased Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, in the Supreme Court itself:


Unfortunately he seemed quite unmoved by my pleadings.

We didn't finish until Thursday, so we only had two days to explore Washington but we managed to take in the White House and the other federal buildings, and even had lunch in the House of Representatives' restaurant - the fact that the University was paying for our meals played no part in that decision. I had to be dragged shopping on the last day, but at least I actually did buy some things for myself and held myself in such a way that seemed to amuse some fellow shoppers in perhaps the biggest queue I've ever found myself in (made worse by the fact that I was merely holding station for Emma).


I've said before how much I regretted signing up for this course, but it's only now that I realise how wrong I was, and not just because it took us to the USA. Instead, it's given me the opportunity to work with three great people closely in a proper team environment for seven months, and we've gotten to know each other so much better than would have been the case if we just had classes together. Taking part in such an international competition is so eye opening as well, seeing teams from poor countries with only two people and no coach who have really done everything themselves, is nothing less than humbling and inspirational. As is the ability to talk to compete against people from the other side of the world, and then afterwards be able to talk to them normally. The competition's tag line was something like "The future leaders of the world first met here as friends" and while that's too idealistic, it captures the essence of the thing. And having experienced it first hand, I wouldn't have missed it for the world.

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