NUJS Kolkata qualified for the ELSA WTO Geneva Moot 2014 after winning its Asia Pacific Rounds at Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, against Hong Kong university, on 3 March.

RMLNLU Lucknow will join NUJS in Geneva, having made it to the semi finals of the Asia Pacific Rounds, where it lost to NUJS.

JGLS Sonepat, which made it to the quarter final rounds, was the only other Indian team to have broken at any round at the moot. Out of 27 participating teams, eight were Indian law schools: NLSIU Bangalore, Nalsar Hyderabad, GNLU Gandhinagar, HNLU Raipur, Christ University Bangalore, JGLS, RML and NUJS.

The win has helped Kolkata, which bagged fourth place at last year’s ELSA WTO world rounds, climb up to eighth place in the Herbert Smith Freehills-sponsored Mooting Premier League (MPL) season 5 table. RMLNLU has also jumped up three ranks to 12th place.

The Geneva rounds are currently scheduled for 13 to 18 May 2014.

Mooting and emulating

NUJS speakers Akshaya Venkatraman and Surabhi Dhar and researchers Prashant Srinivasan and Varun Ramdas led the law school to victory. Dhar and Venkataraman also, respectively, won citations for Best Speaker at semi finals and the final rounds. The NUJS team was not reachable for comment at the time of going to press as they had not yet returned to India.

The RMLNLU team was comprised of Aayush Jain, Garima Prakash and Dviya Chaudhary. Chaudhary was adjudged the best speaker at the Quarter finals.

Jain said that the Indian teams participating at the Asia Pacific Rounds would benefit from an “Indian pre-round”, which should be considered from next year onward.“I was very impressed with the organisation of the moot, we can learn from them on how to organise our moots. I was impressed by the quality of judges.

“In India alumni and inexperienced people judge prelims and the arguments go on deaf years, whereas at Kuala Lumpur, from the outset there were authorities on panel, and this reduced the possibility of an incorrect decision. There were around 10 -15 judges for the competition and they kept revolving till the finals.” he added.

Chaudhary said the judges included the DG of the WTO, Melbourne University professor Andrew D Mitchell and others whom the team “read about during preparations” and “cited in their memorial”.

Update with comment from NUJS: “Since we’re all mooting for the first time, we were quite unsure of what to expect. However, the more experienced mooters in college and our WTL professor D Sandeepa Bhat helped us with the preparation we needed for the oral rounds. The moot itself was a great experience most importantly because of the kind of panelists we argued in front of. Their expertise in world trade law was both intimidating and enriching which helped us grow through the competition. We were thrilled to qualify for the world rounds but winning and bagging the best speaker awards for both the final rounds and the semi-final rounds was just the icing on the cake.

“While we ourselves are just learning and getting the hang of it all, some advice we did get from panelists was to deal with arguments in a manner that would be tenable in real dispute resolution as opposed to relying too heavily on extreme, innovative arguments. There’s an awful lot more work to be done! We’re primarily looking at practicing more and plugging all the loopholes we discovered during the regional rounds.”

Upcoming Moots: 5th NLUJ Anti Trust Moot, 2014: 7 – 9 March. Catch it blow by blow here.

At a glace: Moot wise

At a glance: law school wise

MPL 5 season standings