Judging Jessup

It’s that time of year. This week, students from around the United States are competing in the regional rounds of the Phillip C. Jessup International Law Moot Court Competition. Meanwhile, national competitions are taking place all over the globe, all leading up to the international rounds in Washington D.C. at the end of March. Nor is this solely a student affair–many law professors and practicing international lawyers will also engage with the problem as coaches or judges. I’ll be judging the final round we’re hosting here at Temple this year, and am looking forward to pretending to be an ICJ judge and hearing the students make their best arguments.

Of course, one of the great ironies of Jessup is how far afield the actual competition lies from the ICJ proceedings it’s designed to replicate. As anyone whose litigated before the World Court will tell you, the Court doesn’t tend to act as a “hot bench” — there’s no interrupting the parties with questions or additional hypotheticals, which so frequently characterize the Jessup competition. In truth, the ICJ is a much more formal affair, with few, if any, questions supplementing the parties (lengthy) presentations, and, even then, exchanges with the Court frequently occur in ways that don’t require an immediate response.

So, what’s the point? Why do students spend hundreds of hours, and international lawyers return year after year, to work on a made-up problem, between mythical countries, before a court that appears equally mythic when compared to its real-life counterpart? I suppose one answer could be that it’s a teaching tool–we use Jessup to teach students international law doctrine, whether it’s the court’s compulsory jurisdiciton or the rules on state responsibility. But, I’m not sure that’s an entirely satisfactory answer. After all, the expertise gained through Jessup only extends to the issues raised in that year’s problem; there’s no guarantee that Jessup participants are getting the overview of international law more generally that they’ll need to practice in the field (although undoubtedly, some of the best teams succeed precisely because they have that knowledge).

No, for me, the real value of Jessup lies in what I’d call its “networking” effects. As much as international law scholarship likes to emphasize all the networking that occurs among non-state actors and international organizations today, maybe we shouldn’t ignore just how many of those doing the networking got their start at Jessup. I view my own time on a Jessup team as a seminal event. I loved working with my teammates on the problem, crafting an argument, and then putting it through its paces against teams from around the world. Indeed, that experience helped convince me to become an international lawyer; ditto for two of my teammates. I don’t have any empirical data, but I’d bet that we weren’t alone in feeling international law’s pull through Jessup. And, even if you didn’t do it as a student, chances are if you’re a practicing international lawyer today, Jessup administrators are going to find you and ask you to help judge or coach a team.

I think Jessup has real value in constantly drawing new recruits into international law and keeping practicing lawyers engaged with the field more generally. Certainly, some might question whether this is a good thing (any new sovereigntists out there should feel free to weigh in). And, even if it’s generally a good thing, I suppose we can also question whether Jessup’s doing the recruiting in the right way–are there better ways to introduce future practitioners to the field than through the relatively rare and highly doctrinal ICJ case, filtered through a competition that effectively endorses common law appellate advocacy? Still, even with such questions marks, the fact is, if you like international law at all, Jessup is fun. And, so I expect to have a good time this weekend judging Jessup, and hope the participants enjoy the competition as much as I did when I was in their shoes.