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Moot Court

Moot courts are an integral part of legal training in the Anglo-American legal world, but are also becoming increasingly popular in Germany. In a moot court, students pretend to work as lawyers on a fictitious case and appear before a fictitious court. Both the submissions and the pleadings are assessed by “judges” according to a specific points system. In international competitions, the “court language” is usually english, but there are also French-speaking moot courts available.

The participation in a moot court is beneficial for law students in many ways. It makes a significant contribution to a more lawyer-oriented, thus practice-oriented, legal education, promotes rhetorical skills and imparts knowledge of foreign-language legal terminology. At the same time, the foreign language certificate required by the new study regulations can be obtained. Moreover, participating can lead to a seminar certificate and 10 ECTS in Master’s program of Business Law and Economic Law (LL.M.oec).

The teams, supervised by Professor Tietje's chair at the Faculty of Law at the Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg, have been extremely successful in recent years. Every year, the Chair and the Research Center for Transnational Business Law supervise a team for the ELSA John H. Jackson Moot Court, which primarily deals with WTO law. In Addition, since 2016, the participation on the Skadden Foreign Direct Investment International Arbitration Moot, which deals with investment protection law, is being offered as well yearly.

Are you curious what happens during the oral pleading of a WTO panel as part of the ELSA WTO Moot Court? A good impression of this is provided by a report on the 2011/2012 moot court team from UniTV in Halle and an older report from the MDR broadcast “Hier ab vier” on April 21, 2006.

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