5 - Rehearsing Rehearsing: Repetition in International Moot Court Competitions

Summary

Chapter five is the most programmatic of all. It grew out of uneasiness about my role as coach of teams participating in international moot court competitions. These competitions claim to bring litigation practice into legal education. However, although I see the value of mooting, I increasingly felt that these competitions were neither reflecting practice nor what academic training should be about. The chapter is an attempt to articulate my uneasiness as well as to come up with an alternative. It contains a critique on international moot court competitions, based on a comparison between two traditions of rehearsing in European theatre. The first understands rehearsing as mimicking an ideal model as closely as possible. Most existing international moot court competitions, I argue, fit this tradition. The second is the Brechtian tradition, which understands rehearsing as experimenting an echo of Kierkegaard’s notion of "repetition forward." In the last part of the chapter, I rethink international moot court competitions along Brechtian lines. Instead of training students to outperform others according to pre-fixed criteria, I seek to develop a moot noncompetition, which brings students and staff together in a common experimental environment where the boundaries of litigation are probed.