Auckland national mooting champions again

The Auckland Law School has taken national mooting honours for the fifth year in a row.

In the final of the national mooting competition run by the NZ Law Students Association, the Auckland team of Benedict Tompkins and Matt Beattie defeated Macquarie University (Sydney).

Benedict, judged best speaker, is in the final year of an LLB(Hons) and a BA, majoring in English, while Matt is a fourth-year LLB student.

The final was held in the Hamilton High on 3 September in front of around 30 including fellow competitors, family and friends. The judges were Justice Tipping of the Supreme Court, Justice Heath of the High Court and Andrew Beatson, a partner from Bell Gully, the law firm that sponsored the competition.

Earlier the Auckland pair won in the preliminary rounds against Waikato, Canterbury and Otago. They were in fact defeated by Macquarie in the prelims, who were taking part in the NZLSA championships for the first time.

Benedict and Matt will now go on to represent New Zealand in the the Philip C. Jessup International Law mooting competition in Washington DC in the last week of March 2012 .The problem (called a "compromis", as the Jessup moot takes place before the International Court of Justice) is released later this month.

“Typically the problem itself runs to about 20 pages, and the written memorials that we have to prepare will total about 20,000 words,” says Benedict. “We will start preparing, more or less, straight away.” They will require financial support to travel to Washington which has traditionally been generously provided by the Law Foundation.

In the Hamilton final they were “not at all confident of winning, either before the competition as a whole or before the final. The competition was of the highest quality throughout, and many of the moots were, from our perspective, too close to call.”

Both spoke for 20 minutes in each moot. The problem in the final concerned the interpretation of a contract, and in particular the ability of the court construing the contract to take into consideration pre-contractual negotiations between the parties, and post-contractual conduct.

“This is a controversial and difficult area of the law, making for a challenging moot,” explains Benedict. “The challenge was all the more acute in the final due to the fact that the one of the judges, Justice Tipping, had written leading judgments on both of these areas, and Matt and I had to argue that his Honour had basically got the law totally wrong.”

Benedict and Matt’s main training came from Auckland Law School’s Advocacy course, which was taught by Simon Mount (a barrister at Bankside Chambers) and Jesse Wilson (a solicitor at Bell Gully). They qualified for the national mooting competition by winning the Stout Shield, the Auckland Law School's senior mooting contest. The Stout Shield is limited to members of the Advocacy class, an elective paper taken by a limited number of Law students in their final year.