"Over the weekend, 10 members of the DBHS Mock Trial team competed at a National Moot Court Competition held at UGA (University of Georgia in Athens).

The students competed in two-person teams. The teams were:

Mia Artale (12) and Chloe Zhuo (12)

Jayden Choi (10) and Sean Yu (12)

Rebecca Yeung (11) and Neval Balik (12)

Cassandra Oh (11) and Sabrina Wu (11)

Annie Kung (10) and Doria Chen (10)

 

BIG NEWS FIRST: Mia Artale and Chloe Zhuo took second place and as such qualify for “Nationals” which will be held virtually at the end of April.

Chloe Zhuo was named, based on her individual scores throughout the competition, as one of the top 5 best speakers.

 

The students competed in three rounds Saturday then only the top 16 teams go on to compete on Sunday. Of the 5 teams above, 3 qualified for the elimination rounds on Sunday. Of those three, one team: Mia Artale and Chloe Zhuo made it to the finals. They lost to two students who had just finished competing the week before using the exact same case. In the pictures below you can see Mia and Chloe as they argue in front of a panel of seven judges, all of which could and did interrupt them at any time during their arguments…in fact, I believe that Mia only presented about two paragraphs of her 13 minute argument for all the questions they asked.

Moot Court is meant to represent an appellant argument being made in front of the Supreme Court. There are two fictitious issues and each member of the team is responsible for one of them (names listed first above were Issue I). Students must research and learn about 10 Supreme Court cases and use them to write their own 10 minute argument…both FOR and AGAINST the issue. If the two-person team is petitioner in a round, they must also, on the fly, write and present a two minute rebuttal based on respondents arguments for BOTH issues. Chloe and Mia, for the final round, had to argue for 13 minutes each then Chloe gave a 4 minute rebuttal (which was flawless!)

 

The two issues were extremely difficult for many reasons: the cases we were given were particularly complicated to understand, the legal precedent at bar was daunting and the fictitious case was based on a non existent law so we couldn’t cheat and look up real precedent that dealt specifically with it. The first issue was whether or not a fictitious home-owner in a made-up town in Northern California could sue three of the largest burners of fossil fuels for their role in causing climate change specifically as the cause of the exponential increase in the likelihood of wildfire damage in that town as well as the inability of the homeowner to get wildfire insurance since all companies in the area stopped providing it.…the case was written almost a year before the LA fires and the organization apologized if it is was too painful for any of the CA teams to argue…. The second issue was whether or not the judge in the original case should have disqualified himself given his connection to petroleum companies and his public instances of lashing out at climate change and those who blame petroleum companies for it…clearly the writers of the case were giving students a lesson in the very real.

I cannot say enough about how hard these students worked, how much they put into the process both for themselves and the rest of the team. We started practice in January, met after school every day. Almost every team member had other large time commitments they had to juggle to do this.

 

Margaret Ku and I had such a great time with them in Georgia especially since we had help in our efforts. Joohee Lee, special ed teacher, and her husband Jun went with us. I needed a male chaperone and their son, Jayden is on the team. Margaret and I are so appreciative of their positive energy and hard work (they did a lot of the cooking and such at the house we rented for the weekend plus they drove one of the two vans).

Some photo notes: pictures at UGA (beautiful campus, mascot is a Bulldog), time at the Capital building in Atlanta.

 

Three more teams will be competing in two weeks in a virtual version of the same competition with the same case. Stay tuned for that update.

 

If you are wondering, we returned VERY late MONDAY night!"