Walter Hutchens’ Blog

Last week I was in Shenzhen to help judge China’s national rounds of the Jessup International Moot Court Competition. Twenty six teams from all over China participated in the competition, held at Shenzhen University.

The Jessup competition is in English. Each year teams stand before panels of make-believe judges (though some of the judges are, in fact, real-life judges) to argue a hypothetical public international law dispute, advocating on behalf of one or another sides of the dispute.

This year’s case concerned the admission of a particular nation-state to an inter-governmental organization (IGO) very much like the European Union. The nation-state was denied membership in the organization despite having fulfilled onerous terms set out as pre-conditions to its accession in an agreement between the nation-state and the IGO.

After the denial of accession, the nation-state arrested a diplomat from the IGO, entered its legation to seize records and passed a law that forbade profits from entities that had been privatized as part of the accession effort from flowing back to the IGO member states.

The nation-state then brought claims before the International Court of Justice, suing the IGO member states for breach of the accession agreement.

The IGO member states counter-sued for breach of international law for the failure to provide immunity to the IGO’s diplomat and legation premises.

The IGO member states also claimed the law banning repatriation of profits was an illegal expropriation.

Around these substantive claims were problematic issues of standing because the International Court of Justice is by the terms of its organic statute only empowered to hear claims brought by nation-states.

The competition was organized by Prof. Zhu Wenqi from People’s University in Beijing. He did a great job, running a smooth and fair competition and giving both the students and judges an enjoyable experience. I made lots of new friends and thoroughly enjoyed the experience.

The law firms Lovells, Fangda and White and Case were sponsors of the national competition, along with the Wang Family Foundation whose executive director Prof. Francis Wang also participated as a judge.

Justice Carlos Moreno from the California Supreme Court presided over the final rounds (I was honored to serve on the final panel, in which a team from People’s University competed against a team from Xiamen Univ. before a crowd of a few hundred).

Because I have spent many years studying Chinese, I could genuinely appreciate how awesome a feat it is for these students to argue in English about complex factual and legal matters, with frequent interruptions from judges whose questions probed the core issues (and sometimes raised offbeat, unexpected matters). The three finalist teams—and many individual advocates from teams that didn’t advance—were excellent. They had mastered the facts and the law and were generally unflappable under fire, providing legal backup for their points (not merely asserting conclusionary statements as so many students to do) and were able to nimbly distinguish difficult precedents and rules.

Sometimes I am discouraged by developments in China, but listening to these outstanding students renewed my optimism about China’s prospects for further developing legal education and even stoked my hopes that over the longer term a stronger version of the rule of law will develop in China.

This is the Jessup’s 48th year and the fifth year Professor Zhu has organized a national tournament in China, so it was denoted in Chinese as something like the Fifth National Moot Court Tournament on International Law or 国际法模拟法庭中国第五届全国选拔赛 (Guojifa moni fating Zhongguo di wu jie quan guo xuanbasai). More information about the Jessup competiton is here.