Monday, October 25, 2010

Back From D.C.

And just like that, my moot court experience is over. I had a great time and I never, ever want to do it again. My relationship with public speaking is complicated. I think I'm pretty good at it, and I've done a lot of it, but I always have terrible nerves beforehand and terrible self-doubt afterward.

As for the competition, my teammates and I finished in the middle of the pack (we made the cut from twenty-five teams to sixteen, then got knocked out in the cut from sixteen teams to eight). In a sense, that was the best case scenario. It was a two-day competition, with the first two rounds on day one. Since we were knocked out in the second round, we had all of day two to explore Washington. It was an excellent consolation prize.

Saturday, October 16, 2010

Moot Court Week at Last

If I haven't posted to this blog in the last week, it is because nothing has changed for me in the last week. Day in, day out, it's practice for moot court competition. The First Amendment is melting my brain.
My partners and our faculty adviser have done a good job of wrangling practice judges for us. In the last two weeks we have had our arguments savaged by the dean, two professors, and three alums. I think we're ready. Ready or not, it will all be over in five days.

Friday, October 8, 2010

Practice Makes Panicked

My moot court partners and I have started up a rigorous practice schedule. We have about a week and a half until competition time, and I'm not sure that's long enough. I need to prepare two fifteen-minute arguments (one on each side of the issue), and I figure we've scheduled enough practice time for me to rehearse each argument eight or ten times.
The competition is going to be more of a test of my extemporaneous speaking skills than I would prefer.

Tuesday, October 5, 2010

Code Blindness

In chess, there is a phenomenon one grandmaster waggishly dubbed amaurosis scacchistica: "chess blindness." It is a player's unaccountable inability to see the obvious, such as a rook bearing down on one's queen.
This week I witnessed an example of what you might call "code blindness" in the form of approximately this exchange about the Internal Revenue Code:

professor: "When does section 307 of the code apply?"
student: "When a transaction is governed by section 305(a)."
professor: "Does section 305(a) govern the transaction on the board?"
student: "No."
professor: "Does section 307 apply to the transaction on the board?"
student: (long pause) "Yes."

This colloquy was repeated a couple of times, with lengthy explanations in between, before the professor got the answer he was looking for. It may have been the most awkward moment I have experienced in law school since my first semester.

Friday, October 1, 2010

Attending Oral Arguments

Yesterday I lived some lawyers' dream: I stepped out of a courtroom and confronted a wall of reporters and cameras. They weren't there to see me. The latest of the West Memphis Three's many appeals was argued before the Arkansas Supreme Court yesterday, and my externship got me a seat in the gallery. The attorneys for both sides brought their A game, so it was interesting stuff (the webcast is archived here), but the borderline party atmosphere outside the courtroom felt a little ghoulish. The press blitz lasted about half the day, but security did a good job of insulating court employees. I never had to come within a hundred feet of a reporter.