BASL breaks new ground with National Mooting Championship

One of the key gaps that exist in the legal education of Sri Lankan law students at present is as to the build-up of legal advocacy skills. This gap, if addressed, would better prepare law students to real-life legal practice.

It is widely acknowledged that the best pedagogical route via which this shortcoming could be addressed, is ‘mooting,’ whereby law students are presented with a fictitious case, requiring them to extensively research and prepare their arguments for both parties of the case from scratch, hand-in written submissions, and finally, present their arguments orally. The students are judged by experienced practitioners and academics.

Although opportunities to moot in English exist for Sri Lankan law students, opportunities to do so in Sinhala and Tamil, the two vernacular languages of Sri Lanka – and the languages of practice in many Courts across the country – are seldom found. On top of this, despite the critical importance of modes of Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) to the legal system as a whole, they remain a fringe topic in law schools.

It is in this context that the Bar Association of Sri Lanka (BASL) aims to host the National Mooting Championship (NMC) – a series of arbitration moots based on commercial disputes – addressing these twin gaps: not only would the NMC provide a platform for law students to moot in the vernacular languages of Sri Lanka, these moots would be the ideal way of imparting knowledge on arbitration to these students.

The NMC would be held in multiple phases across the island, with the first phase set to happen in collaboration with the University of Jaffna on the 8th and 9th of July. 

The first phase is being held online, and the BASL aims to arrange for the involvement and participation of practitioners as assessors and experts, creating opportunities for law students to interact with and learn from them. Each Phase of the NMC would entail not just the moots themselves, but also a series of training led by practitioners and academics, on arbitration, contract and commercial law, and written and oral advocacy.

The Moot Court Bench (MCB) would collaborate with the BASL on all phases of the NMC, along with respective partner universities.

This project, while being fully in line with the BASL’s national development objectives, is in pursuit of raising the standards of advocacy and access to justice. Of especial note is that this project aims to improve the standards of legal education and training of law students in Sinhala and Tamil, and seeks to build bridges of collaboration based on shared learning amongst future lawyers from across the length and breadth of the country. The NMC has the potential to become a key platform upon which future lawyers, of all ethnicities and backgrounds can come together, based on their shared commitment to the rule of law.