Hello! I’m Emily and I’m the Director of Mooting at City. Hopefully most of you have now had a face-to-face talk from me as part of your Welcome Week. Mooting is something we are very passionate about at City and strive to give our students as many opportunities as possible to get involved.

I’ve compiled a schedule of workshops you can sign up for in order to learn the basics. These will be run by some of my star mooters from last year and will run at various times during the next fortnight (w/c 3rd and 10th October 2022). This will get you ready for the internal moots we run for City students and the selection process offered to those who want to moot externally, in competitions taking place in the UK or internationally.

We will offer an introductory session called Mooting 101, plus sessions focused on skeleton arguments, bundles, giving submissions and dealing with judicial interventions. We will also have a number of small interactive workshops where you will have the chance to work on your skills in a small group of 12. I’ll email you all when the sign-up form is available (likely to be 30th Sep).

OK tell me about the internal moots?

We run three internal competitions for our students:

• The City Scholars Moot
• The GDL Moot
• The Senior Moot

The City Scholars Moot is for LLB and GELLB students, as well as LLMs with no previous mooting experience. The GDL Moot is (unsurprisingly) for GDL students. Both of these moots will kick off in late Oct/early November and are open to all. There are 2 rounds, the semi-finals and the finals. The Senior Moot is for all law postgraduates and will take place later in 2022. There are a limited number of places which you need to apply for.

Are there competitions I can enter without going through a City selection process?

Yes! There are a number of moots you can enter independently and we would encourage you to do so. A couple of them have released their problems and application info already, so take a look.

For those of you interested in Environmental law there is the UKELA Moot Competition – this is longstanding competition and the problem should be out soon. Open to all – take a look!

There is also the Human Rights Lawyers Association Judicial Review Moot.

The competition is open to aspiring lawyers throughout the United Kingdom. It begins with a written round involving teams of two submitting paper applications for permission to bring judicial review proceedings. The 8 highest scoring teams from the written round are then chosen to make an oral application for permission before human rights practitioners. The two best teams from the oral round will subsequently go on to compete in the final, which involves the substantive judicial review. The Final is judged by eminent human rights barristers and members of the judiciary.

Register via the online form by the 3rd October 2022 at 6pm. Open to students on all programmes and graduates who don’t have an offer of pupillage/TC as yet. Try to find a partner before signing up but if unsuccessful, the HRLA will try to find you one.

A new one came from the Society for Computers & Law (SCL) and 4 Pump Court on the Law of Artificial Intelligence last year. This was designed to give participants insight into the use of technologies in legal practice and the issues surrounding the governance of emerging technologies. Open to all undergrads/postgrads including GDL and BVC. Nothing out on this yet but will flag it as soon as I hear…

Quadrant Chambers has run a virtual moot event for the last 2 years, taking place in January. So hopefully this will run in 2023! Last year was won by Micha Lazarus from City Law School (you can read their account via the Quadrant website). There only 64 spaces however, with a limit on the number from each institution (it’ll be first-come, first served). The format last year was a speed moot of 7 minutes per round, with a total of 6 rounds for the most successful mooters. They also hold an open evening with talks covering pupillage, life at Quadrant and the commercial bar, and other relevant topics.

The Kingsland Cup is run by the chambers of Francis Taylor Building, pairs of students can enter this prestigious moot independently. Usually on public, environmental and European law topics, it is a very challenging competition. However City students have had great success in this moot, winning on a number of occasions in the past few years, including last academic year. Find out more via the competition website and read the account of the competition from last year’s winners, GDL students, Josh and Beth.

The National Speed Mooting Competition has run for a number of years, and is open to students for a fee. They also run various events and an Advocacy Club. Find out more via their website. There are separate competitions for LLB/GDL and LPC and Bar students.

The great LSE-Featherstone Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Moot competition runs over a weekend in February usually, though it shifted to June in 2022 and we don’t expect news on the 2023 competition for a while yet. The oral rounds of the moot competition run alongside an associated networking event during which participants engage with a number of workshops, discussions, and panels focused on the gamut of SOGI/LGBT+ issues and their interface with the law. Keep an eye on their website for more info.

The UK’s first dedicated animal law moot is the Cecilia Moot! Registration is expected to open in mid-October 2022, so keep an eye on their website. The competition began in 2019 and you can read a write up of that year’s final on Lawbore written by founder (and former City GDL/Bar student Sam Groom), or see a short video on the 2020 final.

The Times team up with the chambers of 2 Temple Gardens to run the Times 2TG Moot and is open to all students with no cap on how many enter from the same institution. Registration usually opens in February…

OK so what if I want to moot against teams from other universities on behalf of City?

Hurray! You will be happy to know there are lots of opportunities for this. There are a number of general competitions we enter (ones which deal in all core areas of law, so round 1 might be on contract, round 2 on crime etc) and we’ll be sending out a selection problem shortly for those of you who want to be considered for this. The big competitions are the OUP/ICCA National Mooting Competition and the ESU-Essex Court Moot but there are a few others too.

And what about the exciting specialist moots?

There are loads to choose from depending on your interest, here are a number of the topic areas moots pivot around:

• Property law
• Judicial review
• European law
• Human rights
• Intellectual property
• International criminal law
• Criminal law
• Insolvency
• Competition
• International law
• International Commercial Arbitration
• Environmental law
• Public law
• Gender identity/sexual orientation
• Animal law
• Media law

You can see a full list of moots on Learnmore. Some moots will run in this country, some further afield. City will support selected teams with guidance (where we have the expertise on hand) and fund the travel and accommodation where it is required.

We don’t have the full picture yet as to what moots will run – some are annual, some skip a year. I’ll send out info as and when I get it.

Yikes! There’s so much choice! How do I choose what to apply for?

Remember there will be a lot of competition for places and for each team we’ll only be looking for between 2-5 students, so you’d certainly want to be applying for multiple teams to raise your chances! Usually it’s worth trying out for the general competitions and then trying for a few of the specialist ones that interest you. One important thing to note is that we only allow students to represent us in one moot. This is for two reasons – so as not to overwhelm you (remember you’ll be studying hard plus also maybe working, doing pro bono etc), and to try and spread opportunities. If you’re lucky enough to get selected more than once, you get to choose.

How do I get updates on mooting?

I’ll be sending out regular emails as details emerge and will duplicate this by placing information on Moodle (Events & Opportunities page). We also may send also may send out occasional posts via our Instagram account.

Any big advice to pass on?

If you are in any way interested, don’t delay. Most opportunities for mooting are pretty front-loaded, so if you’re not in it from the start of term you’ll miss out. The workshops will give you a good grounding in the basics, you can then throw yourself into the internal moots to get the experience of competitive mooting. This sounds scary but it isn’t too bad – remember all the judges in the first couple of rounds are fairly recent graduates, so they remember how daunting it was. The advice and guidance you’ll receive will be so important.