A belated update

Hey, remember how I went to New York a month ago for moot court and was going to try to update with what happened? Oh, yeah, we did really well. Second overall, and I personally got second speaker. Since I am without scruples, let me just steal the law school’s bandwidth to show our picture.



(L to R: Brad (coach), me, Devon (teammate), Todd (teammate), Kristin (coach))

A word on what the competition is. Moot court is a competitive event done by upperclass law students that simulates appellate advocacy. Prior to the tournament, teams must submit their briefs on one side of a fake case. This brief is given a grade, and that grade forms the base of your team’s score (weighted at 40%) for each round of competition. Then, each round of competition has two people on each side arguing an issue before a panel of judges. As in real appellate arguments, the argument may be interrupted at any time by a judge’s question, which means that the arguer does not get to exactly choose the points that come up. Procedurally, moot court nationals is done really strangely, in that the preliminaries are so short. For example, most debate tournaments have no fewer than six preliminary rounds, and most national-caliber tournaments have eight. Moot court regionals have a mere three rounds, and nationals had two. Which, of course, makes the pressure on those two rounds pretty fierce. Thus, it should go without saying that when we lost our first round (to a fine Nebraska team) I thought we might not even make it to the elimination rounds. But, we beat Seton Hall in round 2 and sneaked into the round of 16, from where it was single-elimination. In that round we beat San Francisco, which set us up against Hastings in the quarterfinals. Hastings was very, very good. Their second speaker was an impeccably dressed and composed woman who sounded so polished that I figured she was delivering a canned speech. But then, when she was asked a question she answered in exactly the same way and I knew it was trouble. But, we squeaked by that and into the national semifinals, where we matched up with the team that beat us in the regional finals—Drake. After beating them, we made it to finals and that’s where we lost to South Texas.

Okay, enough about me. A couple of interesting links, movie themed to celebrate Oscar week:

Lost in Translation is really a good movie. Here is a link translating the already famous Suntory Whiskey commercial scene.

Viggo Mortensen’s new movie Hidalgo is claimed to be “based on a true story.” Except, um, it isn’t.


Jeremy Larchick, I know you're out there. Write me an email.