Each year, dozens of interscholastic moot court competitions take place around the country.
There are two reasons to participate in a competition: to learn and to win. Everyone who participates in a moot court competition learns; they learn a great deal about the subject matter at issue and quite a bit about the practice of law.
Nevertheless, despite the many tangible and intangible benefits of learning for the sake of learning, most teams still want to win. If you are a team member on an interscholastic moot court team, this chapter is meant to help you to enhance your learning experience in the hopes that it may help you to win.Appellate advocacy is about mastery. You must master the facts in the case so that you can research and write effectively. You must master the law at issue so that you can explain why the law dictates the result that you seek. Moot court competitions are about demonstrating your mastery of the law and the facts through the vehicles of briefs and oral arguments.
Like the writing process generally, moot court competitions are also about making decisions. You and your teammates may be able to decide which competition to join or which side to argue. You will definitely have to decide how to divide your workload, how to assign the issues that the case presents, how to write the brief, and how to conduct the argument.
Like real practitioners, you will be able to seek advice, to greater or lesser degrees, from colleagues or mentors. Ultimately, however, you must decide which advice to take and which advice to leave alone.
Every time I coach a team, or when I judge practice arguments for other teams, I tell them that they must decide whether they agree with my advice. I explain the reasons behind my suggestions, but they will be the ones at the podium during the competition. No matter whose advice they follow, they may well be victims of what I call “pet peeveitis”: Someone will deduct points from their score because they did or did not do something that happened to be a pet peeve of one of the judges. Therefore, they must sift through the often conflicting advice they will receive from the many people who judge their practice arguments and decide which advice best fits their theory of the case and their performance style.1
Because law practice is full of real-life decision making, one of the many benefits of moot court competitions is that they give students practice in making decisions in a context in which there will be real consequences: their victory or defeat in an argument round. The information in this book is meant to help you make those decisions, but it is advice. Only you and your teammates can decide how to use this advice.