John Marshall reigns supreme at UH MCNC

The second annual Moot Court National Championship concluded Saturday night with The John Marshall Law School standing tall above the other 15 invited schools. Launched last year by the University of Houston's Blakely Advocacy Institute as sort of a counterpart to NITA's mock trial Tournament of Champions, "The Championship" (as Blakely Director Jim Lawrence calls it) had nearly $8,000 in prize money to dole out. John Marshall took home $4,000 as champions. Southern Methodist University Dedman School of Law won $2,000 as the tournament's runner-up. Florida Coastal School of Law and South Texas College of Law were the semifinalists.

Chicago-Kent College of Law, Illinois Institute of Technology received $1,000 for winning the Best Brief award; Danielle Ravencraft of the Salmon P. Chase College of Law, Northern Kentucky University scored a cool grand for being named Best Oralist.

All in all, I was quite impressed with the tournament. For one, it's obvious that Professor Lawrence and his committee -- which was headed up by UH moot court alumni -- bent over backward to provide a great experience. They were constantly seeking input on what was good and what was bad, which shows they care about what they're doing and the future of the competition. The rounds took place at the federal district courthouse, which was only problematic to the extent there was a lot of confusion about what courtrooms we were arguing in. More importantly though, the level of competition was incredibly stout. I've commented that this past year's ABA NAAC national finals was the same way, but honestly, of the four teams we played, all were just as good as any team I saw in Chicago last year.

As I told Professor Lawrence, I would prefer that he run the competition "in the open" (or at least provide win-loss and point differential information as the competition progresses) like the NAAC and the National Moot Court Competition, but that's really my only complaint. Each team argues four preliminary rounds, which is just tremendous (it protects you from being stung by one rogue panel of judges). The ABA and NMCC finals both have just two preliminary rounds, which I think is at least one too few.

Also impressive was the symposium the law school hosted on Thursday, which was tied to the subject matter of the problem. It appeared as if only half or so of the teams showed up to the symposium, but it was very well done and a nice touch.

Anyway, congrats to everyone at Blakely for a well-run tournament -- having seen the outstanding level of competition, I'd say it absolutely deserves a seat at the table alongside the NAAC and NMCC in terms of competition prestige.