City Law School GDL students James Gardner and Edward Gilmore spent Sunday 22nd January mooting on a property law problem at Inner Temple in the Annual Inter-Varsity Moot. They battled against teams from Oxford Brookes, UCL, Exeter and Sussex, before meeting the University of Dundee in the final….and coming out on top!

Judges for the Inter-Varsity final were Andrew Meyers (Stephenson Harwood), Marc Glover (Tanfield Chambers), Katie Gray (Tanfield Chambers), Master Brougham and Master Hodge.

James comments that “The Inner Temple Inter-Varsity Moot was a challenging and exciting experience. Challenging because we ended up mooting five times in one day, and had to prepare both sides of our respective grounds of appeal. Exciting because we found out whether we were through to the next round, which side we were on and began mooting within a five minute window before each knockout round. We were delighted to win a competitive final, especially given our sleepy performance in the first moot of the day.”

Here’s what Edward had to say about the day: “The moot problem was on proprietary estoppel and offered a fantastic opportunity to get to grips with an area of land law we were yet to study. The format of the competition meant that we were able to improve our arguments and style on the basis of feedback from the judges. There was also the opportunity to steal any good submissions your opponents from the previous round had made! Further, the task of arguing both sides encouraged us to treat the arguments in a lawyerly rather than an academic way: less concerned about which side is correct than about what will persuade the judge. Consequently, it was an extremely educative experience where we both felt our performance developed over the day.”