First year moot court
First year student Moot Court arguments are scheduled at the Concord District Courthouse and Merrimack County Superior Courthouse on April 13th, 14th and 15th from 5:00 pm until approximately 8:30 pm.
In the past, many of you have generously volunteered your time to make the final oral argument a high quality experience for our students. In order to schedule arguments for the first year class, we schedule 84 panels consisting of 3 judges each, totaling 252 judges (many sit twice in an evening).
We hope you will volunteer this year and if you have not volunteered recently, please consider it this year. If you are interested, please respond to Deborah Hoefs by attaching your resume for consideration (only if you have not previously judged moot court) and we will contact you soon. Please do not hesitate to contact Deborah, (603) 513-5116, if you have any questions or concerns about judging.
You may volunteer to sit on 1 or 2 panels a night and feel free to volunteer for more than one night. Following are summaries of the moot court problems. You will have an opportunity of letting us know your preference.
Sincerely,
| Margaret McCabe Legal Skills Coordinator |
Deborah Hoefs Moot Court Administrator |
2 Cases
These are the synopsis of the 2 cases you have to choose from.
Coburn v. Martinez
(Civil Procedure/Personal Jurisdiction – Validity of Personal Service)
This is a federal case set in district court. The parties are arguing a motion to quash personal service and students are assigned to write a Memorandum of Law supporting or opposing the motion.
The legal issue is whether the plaintiff, a former police officer, fraudulently lured the defendant, an investigative journalist, into Tennessee for the sole purpose of personal service.
The plaintiff fatally shot a prisoner while she was an officer and the defendant has dedicated great effort to publicizing the facts of that shooting. At this point, the defendant possesses tape recordings of the plaintiff’s psychotherapy sessions following the shooting. The defendant has threatened to release the tapes to the public, and the plaintiff is desperately trying to stop him. The defendant has moved to quash the personal service based on fraud, while the plaintiff objects arguing that the defendant came to Tennessee voluntarily to discuss the circumstances of the shooting.
The court must decide what legal standard applies to personal service obtained by fraud and whether the plaintiff did fraudulently lure the defendant to Tennessee for the sole purpose of service.
State v. David Stone
(Criminal/Evidence)
The issue in this case is whether, pursuant to New Hampshire Rule of Evidence 404(b), evidence of the Defendant’s debt and his lifestyle which lead to this debt, including his gambling addiction, is admissible to establish his identity and motive in a burglary case.
This assignment is a memo of law in support (or in objection to) a motion in limine to admit, or keep out, evidence of defendant David Stone’s gambling addiction. The memo will focus on New Hampshire cases pertaining to Rule 404(b) as well as cases from other jurisdictions.
