“Chief justice, and may it please the court. My name is Omar Rafael and I along with my co-counselor, Jesse Reiff, represent the petitioners, Manny Slater and his parents...”
My mind raced as I delivered my opening. I forced a nervous smile and slowly scanned the panel of judges in efforts to figure out if I had caught their attention. Upon seeing the judge on the far-right return a smile, I slowly loosened my grip of the podium and began to feel comfortable. In just a matter of minutes, this would all be over.
Moot court was one of the most rewarding experiences throughout my years in high school. Not only did it help me meet one of my closest friends during freshman year and give me a taste of what it is like to be an attorney, moot court ultimately provided a worthwhile experience that lead me to embrace and enjoy the intricacies of the English language.
In a succinct manner, moot court simulates an appellate court or arbitral case, the latter being more similar to the cases that appear before the U.S. Supreme Court. Contrary to what one sees on shows like Law&Order or CSI, moot court is not a trial. Instead, it is more concerned on the interpretation and application of the law to a particular case. Moot court generally only involves a panel of judges and the attorneys presenting their arguments for the party that they are representing.
Townsend Harris High School participates in the annual citywide Mentor Moot Court Competition that is held at Fordham Law School beginning in November. The NYC Bar Association pairs participating high schools with law firms that help prepare teams for the actual competition. Each year, the case for the competition is unveiled in early October and from there on, students and law firms work together to prepare a basic argument for the competition as the heart of the competition lies in how competitors fair against a bench and the questions they pose in efforts to make the competitor falter. Amid this process, competitors are scored based on their understanding of the law, their application of the law to the case at hand, their ability and effectiveness to address the concerns voiced by the panel, and their overall presentation.
In retrospective, I do not know what drove me to want to join this academic team. Since elementary school, I have always yearned to become an engineer. All I can remember is that from the moment I started attending the team meetings, I had decided to work towards becoming an actual competitor. I truly struck out that year. Freshmen were generally not favored to compete for obvious reasons but because two seniors had left the year before, auditions were held for the available spots. This screening process was where I met my close friend Jesse as he and I were the only two freshmen trying out to be on the team that air.
Once we had earned our spots onto the competing team of four, it was all work. In a span of four weeks, the competitors have to learn the basics of law, read and fully know the case distributed that year as if they had written it, peruse a lot of case-law to gain insights on the issues and laws pertaining to the case, and finally, prepare a roadmap, essentially an outline of the points you hope to make before the panel of judges. It was through this scaffolding process that I learned to appreciate the beauty of the English language.
English is key in law. With this I do not just mean that one has to be fluent. No. Instead, if you truly want to succeed, you need to dominate the language so that it completely works to your advantage. If I had to describe it in simple terms, law is basically English on steroids. Everything comes into play. Diction, or one’s word choice is important. Rhetoric is crucial. When you are arguing before the panel, not only do you have to believe what you yourself are saying, you have to persuade the judges that what you are saying is the best way to go about. Even imagery helps as you want to paint a picture where what you’re advocating makes perfect sense.
In that year’s case, the plaintiff was a disabled child who claimed that the school he attended had not done enough to accommodate his needs and that as a consequence, he had been harmed. The school on the other hand responded by saying that although they did not entirely abide by Manny’s IEP plan, a plan customized to Manny that outlined what accommodations he needed, that Manny made significant progress and therefore did not cause Manny any harm. This is the simplified version. In the case, there were many technicalities that both helped and harmed both sides. For instance, the there were two major laws that were set as precedent for cases of this nature. The one I was advocating to be used looked to whether or not the school made a meaningful effort to help the child. Just in that phrasing there are many problems. For one, what constitutes a “meaningful effort”? Delving further into the case, if the school could not abide by Manny’s IEP plan because they simply did not have the resources, could they be held liable? The second part of this law looked to whether the school’s alleged failures were to a significant extent where the child suffered harm. Well, what constitutes a “significant failure”? What constitutes a “harm”? It were these little but important questions that had to be addressed one way or another if you intended to prove your case.
When drafting up my road map, I remember initially thinking that these little questions were nothing but trivial. The theme of my first road map was that a school had an obligation to cater to the needs of disabled students under the Free Appropriate Public Education statute that called for schools to follow a disabled child’s IEP. As we started to moot each other however, it quickly became evident that an argument of that sort would never hold in court. If you intended to win, you needed to tackle the technicalities of the laws. You had to show you understood them. You had to clearly define any ambiguous phrase in a way that favored you. However, it did not end there. If the court completely neglected your case-law and instead chose to go with the opposing side’s logic and law, you had to be willing to go the extra mile and embrace and adapt those laws so that they favored you.
As the competition drew nearer and nearer, it was truly comforting to see my argument go from being very primitive and vague to something much more tailored and conspicuous. With the guidance of the attorneys whom we worked with for two hours weekly, after each test run I gave my argument, I would make sure I knew how to explain everything I mentioned in it, and that it did not contain anything that was unnecessary. By the time the competition came around, the team was ready to the point where we would not need paper to go up with us - we had all gotten to know our arguments so well that no matter what curveballs were thrown at us, we could stand our own.
Moot court provided a valuable and significant experience in my life. Going beyond winning or losing a competition, it enabled me to hone and strengthen my skills as both a reader and a writer. All the countless hours spent reading case-law were not for nothing. In the beginning, I have to admit that it was tough sifting through all the texts for specific examples or phrases that would strengthen my argument. As I did this more and more however, this gradually became easier. Through the process of drafting my argument, I learned to weed out unnecessary information and thereby how to become more direct in my writing. I learned there are many ways of phrasing the same information and that each phrasing has its own particular effect on the listener. I learned that depending on what you intend to accomplish, that certain literary techniques work better then others. It was through all of this that moot court made me appreciate English. Although I have deviated from this activity for now, I know for certain that everything I learned in moot court will not leave me. Now, I just hope to build upon the foundations I already have to become a better reader and writer.
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