Moot Court, Part I

(A commentator in the previous post asked about moot court. I'll probably write an entry about my own personal experience sometime later, but here's a more general post)

For the uninitiated, or for those unfamiliar with the intricacies of the legal system, it’s a bit hard to describe exactly what moot court entails. It’s kind of like mock trial, I guess, except there’s no trial..or jury…or witnesses. It’s kind of like giving a speech, too, except you’re liable to be interrupted 20 seconds in, by a judge asking you to answer a completely off-the-wall question. Closer to the truth could be to call it a conversation, or maybe a debate, between yourself and the judges, although that only describes a fraction of the actual work that goes into moot court.

I’ll spare most of the more mundane details, but moot court basically seeks to emulate what happens at the appellate level. There’s already been a trial, ostensibly, and your job as a fake lawyer is to first write a brief (basically, a paper setting forth the main points of your argument) on this fake case, and then to argue your position as either the appellant or appellee in front of a panel of fake judges. In some cases, when the moot court is consequential or prestigious, the judges are real.

At Columbia, participation in moot court is mandatory for every first-year student, but not everyone participates in the same one. There are a whole host of specialty moot courts, which focus on a particular theme in their fake cases: the Native American Moot Court, the International Arbitration Moot Court, the Environmental Law Moot Court, etc. These usually get going in the fall, and one has to apply and go through a selection process to become a part of one of them. This process typically involves sending in an application and then going through a rather intimidating face-to-face audition process with existing members of the team. Some groups are more competitive to get into than others. It’s kind of like being recruited for the basketball team: you try out, hope for the best, and wait to find out whether the team has picked you.

For those who weren't picked (e.g. me), we must participate in the Foundation Moot Court program. These are identical to the specialty moot court programs, except they start up in the Spring rather than the Fall, and the topic of the case can be anything, because they're written by second-years who supposedly did well in the Foundation program last year.

This all sounds a bit more consequential than it really is. The requirement is pass/fail, which provides precious little incentive to put in more than a token amount of work since we have 4 real classes to balance on top of moot court. However, it's useful in the sense that it combines many of the skills that one should have learned over the past semester: how to research cases, how to cite them, and how to write a coherent argument, among other things. Of course, now that it's time to actually put all those skills to use, I feel woefully unprepared. But more on that later.