Passing Moot Judgment

Last week Bowen hosted an undergraduate moot court tournament. It was a big tournament, and I was one of several dozen students drafted to serve as judges. I did this last year, too, and felt poorly qualified to criticize anyone's forensic skills. This year, with more moot court experience under my belt, I felt like an old pro. This weekend I'll be judging again in an intramural moot court tournament.

The more time I spend around moot court competitions, the less I think they resemble real appellate advocacy, but it's still a fun academic exercise--much more fun from the judges' side of the bench than the advocates' side. Hopefully the powers that be will keep using me for these tournaments after I graduate. Hopefully I will have an actual job as an actual lawyer to justify my participation in these tournaments after I graduate.

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.

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.

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.

Progress on the Moot Court Front

I did not meet my self-imposed deadline for sending my moot court brief to my partners. I sat down at the computer last night with the idea of emailing something out by the end of the night come hell or high water, but when I finally finished my draft I decided to sleep on it before I hit "send." Good thing. What feels like an epiphany in the wee hours often looks more like a hallucination after a good night's sleep. After a substantial rewrite, I sent my draft on its merry way (in the end, it was about twenty-five hundred words, not the three thousand I predicted).

Demon Procrastination

Well, my recent promise of moot court updates has gone unfulfilled. The due date for the brief is coming on fast, and I've barely started writing. On Tuesday I promised a teammate that I would get her a draft of my section of the brief before the weekend. At this point, that more or less means writing a three-thousand-word paper in a day. This is going to be a very rough draft.

Schedule Conflicts

About half of my credits this semester are coming not from classes but from "co-curricular" activities: externship, moot court, law review. You would think that would make my schedule very flexible, but I am starting to see that it is going to cause some problems.
This week, for example, the judge I extern for wanted to take the office to lunch. I wasn't about to pass that up, so I missed Decedents' Estates. That would be fine if I weren't already scheduled to miss Decedents' Estates twice in October when I travel for my moot court competition. The DE professor will summarily drop anyone who misses more than four classes, so I only have one more absence to spare. My calendar is going to be pretty hairy before this semester is over.

Gearing Up for Moot Court

Looking back at my old posts, I see that I haven't mentioned moot court in months. Get ready for a flurry of posts on the topic, because it's about to start occupying a lot of my time. My two partners and I have registered for the Wechsler First Amendment Moot Court Competition at American University in Washington, D.C. (greetings to any of my competitors who arrive here after Googling that phrase). We have the month of September to write our brief, then the first three weeks of October to practice for oral arguments. That's a tight schedule--I had three months to do the same stuff last fall--but I'm sure we're up to the task.

Making the Team

I have been accepted onto the Moot Court Board. This means that next year I'll be able to travel to at least one out-of-state moot court competition on the school's dime. Based on my experience last semester, moot court competitions aren't much fun, but I'm willing to put up with it for the travel and the resume item.

Moot Court Weekend

It was all moot court, all the time this weekend. On Friday, I was a judge at an undergraduate moot court tournament hosted by the school. On Saturday and Sunday, I competed with my moot court classmates in our own tournament. My partner and I were knocked out in the second round (meaning that we had to argue our case three times, because the first round consisted of two arguments: one from each side of the issue). I was not sorry to be knocked out early. The tournament won't affect my grade and, while the class was fun, public speaking is extremely stressful for me.
Incidentally, the issue I was arguing was whether the Sixth Amendment requires a criminal case to be retried if the defendant's court-appointed attorney falls asleep for a few minutes during the trial.