RALEIGH — After months of preparation, Campbell Law School’s Willem C. Vis International Arbitration Moot Court team will travel to Vienna, Austria, on March 31 to compete in the 30th edition of the competition. The team is sponsored by Hartsell & Williams P.A.
The team is comprised of James Murray ’23, Michael Civis ’24 and Michael Tuton ’24 and is proudly coached by Professor Raluca Papadima and the Wallace Advocacy Fellow Maeve Healy ’22.
According to the official Vis Moot website, 378 teams from 89 jurisdictions across the world will be competing this year. This is the first time that the competition has resumed fully in-person programming since the COVID-19 pandemic.
Since January, the team has met and argued against teams from the University of Louisville Brandeis, the University of Craiova, Moldova State University, the University of Bucharest and The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Additionally, Civis and Tuton traveled to New York City to participate in the Fordham University Pre-Moot competition in February.
In the general rounds of the competition, Campbell Law will face the University of Belgrade (Serbia), the University of Montenegro (Montenegro), Doshisha University (Japan) and the University of Geneva (Switzerland).
If you would like to follow along with the team as they compete in Vienna, you can find team updates on their Facebook page at this link.
The purpose of the Vis Moot is to foster the study of international commercial law and arbitration and provide a practical training to students for resolving international business disputes, according to the website. The business community’s marked preference for resolving international commercial disputes by arbitration is the reason this method of dispute resolution was selected as the clinical tool to train law students.
There are two crucial phases in the Vis Moot to train advocacy skills: the writing of memoranda for claimant and respondent and the presentation of arguments in oral hearings held before arbitration practitioners and academics. The forensic and written exercises require determining questions of contract — flowing from a transaction relating to the sale or purchase of goods under the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods and other uniform international commercial law.
The dispute is resolved in the context of an arbitration under specified Arbitration Rules. In the pairings of teams for each general round, every effort is made to have civil law schools argue against common law schools — so each may learn from approaches taken by persons trained in another legal culture. Similarly, the teams of arbitrators judging each round are from both common law and civil law backgrounds.
ABOUT CAMPBELL LAW SCHOOL
Since its founding in 1976, Campbell Law has developed lawyers who possess moral conviction, social compassion, and professional competence, and who view the law as a calling to serve others. Among its accolades, the school has been recognized by the American Bar Association (ABA) as having the nation’s top Professionalism Program and by the American Academy of Trial Lawyers for having the nation’s best Trial Advocacy Program. Campbell Law boasts more than 4,700 alumni, who make their home in nearly all 50 states and beyond. Campbell Law is celebrating 45 years of graduating legal leaders and 14 years of being located in a state-of-the-art facility in the heart of North Carolina’s Capital City.