Are you in for a challenge?

Join the UvA Vis Moot Team!

In short, a moot court is a competition in which teams write legal arguments and plead on a fictional legal problem. In the Willem C. Vis Moot Court, the problem concerns an international commercial dispute between business parties that needs to be solved by an arbitral tribunal under the Vienna Convention for the Sale of Goods.

Each year at the beginning of October (this year this will be on the 8th), the Problem is released. During this period we will discuss the case, you will be prepared for the coming months and will have a chance to meet your team, your coaches and some of the UvA's old team members. After this your team (and all the other teams) will start preparing a memorandum for Claimant, making use of all the facts in the material that support the Claimant's position.

After submitting the memorandum for the Claimant at the beginning of December, all submitted memoranda are shuffled and re-distributed to the participating teams. This means that each team receives a memorandum supporting the Claimant's position from another team. Now the paper for the Respondent has to be drawn up in answer to that.

After the Respondent's memo is submitted, the oral preparations begin as each team has to defend its position in moot hearings. The oral preparations involve participating in (international) pre-moots in for example Shanghai and official competitions of Hong Kong and Vienna (usually in the weeks directly prior to Easter). Due to COVID-19, it is not sure if the official competitions in Vienna and Hong Kong will be virtual or in person this year. We of course hope that the competitions will be in person so that we can travel to these wonderful places and compete against other teams in real life. Hopefully, we will also get the chance to travel to some of the pre-moots. If travelling turns out not to be possible, we will work on other replacement activities that will make your participation in the UvA Moot Court team as exciting and educational as it would have been normally.

The tribunals are made up of judges, solicitors, barristers, arbitrators, coaches and professors. Here you actually get to (virtually) meet the people who write all the big fat books about the Vienna Convention and arbitration that you have used for six months.

Awards are given for the best memoranda, the best individual pleaders and the best pleading teams, who manage to make it until (after) the elimination rounds...