Indian law students take their mooting seriously. This is evident from the fact that students from India have won almost every major international moot court competition (Jessup, Vis, Manfred Lachs, and Stetson) over the last decade. Certainly no mean achievement. Yet, very little is actually written about students’ experiences – their highs and lows, the excitement and frustration, or the strategies and styles they adopted. Most accounts involving successful mooters are known to only a very select few.
This column will be dedicated to a discussion of mooting activity. We will, over the next few months, not only share with you our experiences, but also try and invite other ex-mooters, both from India and abroad, to contribute to, and write for this column.
We begin our first column by addressing a few common apprehensions almost every law student experiences before his first moot, which most often is the intra-university selection moot.
“I don’t want to take part. Mooting is not for me. I’ve never been a good public speaker, have always hated debating and can’t, for the life of me, understand why people spend so much time researching for just 15 minutes of actually arguing!”
Perhaps the single biggest misconception about participating in moot courts is that you have to be extremely eloquent, even aggressively flamboyant while arguing to perform well. In fact, good debaters often make terrible mooters, and the most ordinary speakers end up winning the biggest competitions. The truth is that mooting is for everybody. If mooters from Kyrgyzstan assisted by interpreters can beat teams from Harvard Law School, then you can certainly rest assured that your English language skills have little to do with your becoming a successful mooter! In fact, records show that mooters from non-English speaking countries such as the Philippine, Venezuela and Germany perform much better than countries where English is the native language.
“I did some preliminary research and find this damn problem totally one sided…The applicants have no case, and I am stuck with that side!”
Unfortunate as it is, no moot court problem is completely neutral. Even the most prestigious competitions in the world find drafting a balanced problem an almost impossible task. For instance, the Jessup, in recognition of this fact, drafts the problem in a manner so that two issues are in favour of the Applicant, and the remaining two in favour of the Respondent.
If you do have the weaker side, don’t fret about it. An experienced moot court judge will always take the relative strength of either side into consideration while marking. In fact, it is often strategically smarter to choose the weaker side since it gives you more scope for ingenuity and originality, and is always highly appreciated by good judges. Arguing the weaker side is also a lot more fun. Moot Court Judges often have to adjudge many rounds involving the same facts, and hearing the same contentions again and again can get quite boring. Often, making far-fetched contentions, (points you know will not stand in an actual court of law) can give you that extra edge for being different, and at the very least, ‘wake up’ a bored judge.
So if this is your first time, give it a shot. Very few students have a good time the first time they moot, but it’s an experience worth going through! Luckily for mooters in India, there are plenty of moots to participate in and make your mark. India perhaps has the most number of national level moot competitions in the world. Quite remarkable, especially given that moot court halls are being razed to the ground in Europe and USA (including such proposals in Harvard!), but that is a topic we’ll reserve for some other time!
More in the Series*:
These are questions we believe are of interest to any mooter. However, given that this is an interactive website, we would be happy to write about any issues you may have about mooting, and answer any of your related queries.
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