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Washington, D.C., Spring 2005
In February 2005, a team of six NYU School of Law students placed second out of twelve teams in the 2005 Sidley-IIEL WTO Moot Court Competition. Hosted by law firm Sidley, Austin, Brown and Wood, and Georgetown University Law Center’s Institute for International Economic Law, the competition takes place each spring in Washington, D.C. The team consisted of four LL.M. students – Po-Siann Goh, Carie Jones, Nomaan Raja and Paul Sirkis – and two second-year J.D. students – Robert Silvers and Leigh Thompson. Meera Pradhan and Thomas Rosenstock, both third-year J.D. students and past participants in the competition, provided the team with invaluable coaching.
The competition requires students to immerse themselves in many facets of the WTO dispute settlement process. The team submitted two 25 page briefs - one for the complainant and one for the respondent in a fictional trade dispute. Composing the briefs offered an opportunity for team members to develop their legal writing skills and to learn the specialized research skills needed to form legal arguments in the context of WTO dispute settlement proceedings. As a group of six, the team developed and refined arguments, researched precedent, and drafted the briefs through a combination of division of labor and collaboration. This group dimension, not often present in legal education, added a degree of realism to the simulated trade dispute.
The subject matter of the fictional dispute was challenging and involved two of the most contentious areas emerging in trade jurisprudence. First, the case was a dispute under the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS). This is an agreement with which no member of the team was familiar at the outset of the competition. To complicate matters, there have been only a handful of disputes under the GATS. Thus, the team had to learn a complex trade agreement from scratch and develop as-of-yet untested arguments by analogy to longer-standing agreements such as GATT. Second, the case was intimately tied up with the controversial prospect of enforcing international labor standards through trade agreements. This subject matter involves cutting edge issues that are, and will continue to be, very live both in academia and within the world’s trade ministries.
The competition itself involved two rounds; a preliminary and a championship round. In the preliminary round, the team argued twice for the complainant and once for the respondent. All six members of the team had a chance to argue. The preliminary round was judged by an array of leading trade law practitioners, government officials and academics. Throughout the round, the course of questioning by the panelists as well as the lines of argument advanced by opponents pushed the team to revisit its litigation strategy and refine (and refine again) its arguments. These two days (and very late nights) of brainstorming and mooting were an extremely demanding yet rewarding part of the competition experience.
The team enjoyed great success in the first round, having won each of the three moots. As a result, the team was invited to participate in the championship round, arguing against the team from Duke Law School before a crowd of spectators in Hart Auditorium at Georgetown University Law Center. Team members Carie Jones and Robert Silvers ably argued the team’s case forcing the judges to engage in extensive deliberations. The NYU School of Law team finished a very-close second. However, any resulting bittersweet emotions were overwhelmed when Nomaan Raja was awarded the prize for being the competition’s most outstanding oralist.
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Washington, D.C., Spring 2004
NYU School of Law students Mark Kleyna, Meera Pradhan, Sami Rashid, Thomas
Rosenstock and Andrew Wong proudly displayed NYU's colors at the second
convening of the Sidley-IIEL WTO Moot Court Competition held in Washington
DC on January 29-30, 2004. Student teams from eight academic institutions
and joint degree programs participated this year: Columbia Law School, Duke
University School of Law, George Washington University Law School, Georgetown
University Law Center, Harvard Law School/Fletcher School, Tufts University
(joint degree program), Howard University School of Law, New York University
School of Law and University of Chicago Law School.
The character of the competition is multi-dimensional, providing the team with an incredible opportunity to rise to the various challenges and an opportunity to learn and hone the necessary skills involved in the event. Our team, in preparation for the competition, drafted two briefs, each 25 pages in length, in which they argued for the fictional countries of Brucia, the complainant, and Analand, the respondent. The dispute in question was a complex trade dispute that implicated traditional violations of GATT Articles I, III and XI as well as more unusual issues such as the applicability of res judicata in the WTO context and the scope of the Article XXI national security exception. The briefs were submitted and marked by judges prior to the team's arrival in Washington D.C. What then followed were three rounds in which the team argued against teams from other top schools. Panels were assembled for each, with government officials, trade practitioners and academics experienced in WTO dispute settlement and WTO law, as well as former WTO Panel members. We were very proud that NYU's team received praise from judges on their outstanding oral performances. Notably, they earned the overall competition award for the "Best Written Submission." All team members found it to be an outstanding and rewarding learning experience, and hope that the foundation has been laid for future years of NYU participation.