By Jessica Chan, second year Law student.
The K.K Luthra Memorial Moot Competition celebrated its 14th anniversary this year and I was lucky enough to be selected to form part of the University of Bristol team this year as a speaker. This year's competition surrounded issues related to international criminal law through a challenging moot problem.
Having mooted before, the thing that was most striking to me was the difference in advocacy styles both in preparation as well as in oral presentation. We were requested to submit "memorials" for the appellants and respondents yet I was used to a simple one page skeleton submission, not a 20 page document. As a result, we spent a lot of time engaging in this new format and learning how to structure our points in more depth on the page.
As for the research, although I had studied criminal law in my first year, the issues that were brought up in the moot question undoubtedly went beyond what we had learned and extensive research was required. I had to study case law from several jurisdictions such as India, UK, and the USA, and had to analyse which cases would be the most persuasive.
When it came time to present our submissions orally, the Indian style of advocacy also was unfamiliar to me. Our opponents presented their cases with more passion and emotion than would be expected in the UK, and even the format of presenting in terms of what order we would speak in was different than what we were used to. Nevertheless, the judges afforded us courtesy in light of our different backgrounds and tailored their questions to our knowledge. Ultimately, we were pleased to advance to the octafinals of the competition.
The competition was a mix of teams from India, the UK, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh... and I found myself in conversation with other teams during lunch and tea time. The competition definitely provided a chance for us to move away from our comfort zone and experience other styles of advocacy, but it also connected us with students from all over the world who were studying the same discipline as us and yet who seemed to have a completely different experience of the study of law.