Structure of the Moot. The business community's marked preference for resolving international commercial disputes by arbitration is the reason this method of dispute resolution was selected as the clinical tool to train law students through two crucial phases: the writing of memorandums for claimant and respondent and the hearing of oral argument based upon the memorandums -- both settled by arbitral experts in the issues considered. The forensic and written exercises require determining questions of contract -- flowing from a transaction relating to the sale or purchase of goods under the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods and other uniform international commercial law -- in the context of an arbitration of a dispute under specified Arbitration Rules.
In the pairings of teams for each general round of the forensic and written exercises, every effort is made to have civil law schools argue against common law schools -- so each may learn from approaches taken by persons trained in another legal culture. Similarly, the teams of arbitrators judging each round are from both common law and civil law backgrounds.
