A total of 14 law schools participated and brought fielding one student each in the role of judge and one as assisting judicial clerk.

Each rounds and the finals consisted of five or four student judges who would give their judgment deliberations on the case problem, being assisted by their judicial clerks and judged by a panel.

The case file was about a cyber attack by independent state Aragorn against independent state Hobbit – modelled on the 2007 attacks by Russian hackers on Estonian virtual infrastructure. The judging was conducted under the procedures of the International Court of Justice (ICJ), although the real-life Estonian attack counter part never made it that far, so the students in the problem also had to establish jurisdiction.

In the finals the student judges were judged by University of Madras professor A David Ambrose, additional solicitor general Mohan Parasaran and Supreme Court judge S Radakrishnan, NLU Jodhpur and NLSIU Bangalore’s judges came third and fourth, with Symbiosis and ULC Bangalore bagging second and first place respectively.

ULC Bangalore fourth-year students Gangesh Varma and Shruti Prabhakar teamed up as judge and judicial clerk, having also participated in several moots in the past.

Prabhakar said: “We wanted to do something different, something other than a moot court.”

Varma agreed and joked: “You get bored of moot courts - this time you can be a judge.”

They said that one difficulty of ICJ judgments was that there was no concept of precedent.

Prabhakar said that in their judgments they were trying to give a judgment that was in favour of Hobbit, although it was easier under existing law to say that Aragorn was not responsible for the attack under international law.

Varma added: “We wanted to bring an accountability – the moment you start denying things to a victim, if there is no accountability, chaos will continue to prevail and no justice will be done.”

Prabhakar and Varma told Legally India that they wanted to pursue careers in international law.

CNLU Patna’s team won the best-written judgment in the competition, which was held as part of the Government Law College International Law Summit over the weekend (5 and 6 February).