The Columbia Law School students impressed a roomful of observers—and Justice Samuel Alito
ENLARGE
Columbia University’s moot court competition gave me flashbacks. I recalled my one and only moot court appearance. It occurred in Prof. Murray Dry’s feared constitutional law class at Middlebury College, circa 1974.
I don’t remember the case. I do my grade: An “A” for presentation, a “C” for substance, the latter being the only one that counted.
Needless to say, the four Columbia Law School students who gave final arguments in this year’s Harlan Fiske Stone Moot Court Competition—Mr. Stone was a 1898 Columbia Law School graduate and sat on the U.S. Supreme Court for 20 years—were far better prepared than I was.
In fact, having made the finals on April 7 constituted no small triumph. Alexander Ely, Timothy Kim, Logan Gowdey and Aaron Michael Macris, all members of the Class of 2016, were the survivors in a three-round elimination competition that started in the fall semester with 47 students.
But their hardest work lay ahead: appearing before a three-judge panel.
The names of the judges may be familiar: Samuel Alito, associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court; José A. Cabranes, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit; and Cheryl Ann Krause, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.
The case was conceived and written by Sarah Mac Dougall and Sydney Egnasko, both also in the Class of 2016. It involved a fictitious app called myDoc, which allows users to consult physicians. myDoc sued the Earhartington Ethics Commission, also a fictional entity, alleging that requiring disclosure of its grass roots lobbying expenditures was an unconstitutional restraint on free speech under the First Amendment.
While wholly made up, the case addresses an increasingly relevant question: Can states constitutionally require disclosure of so-called “AstroTurf” lobbying, where a company encourages its users to contact their legislators on their own initiative.
The proceedings began with the arrival, in the back of the amphitheater classroom, of the three judges flanked by U.S. Marshals—Justice Alito was walking in the middle—and the shout of “All Rise.”
After the jurists had taken their seats at the front came the call of “Oyez, oyez, the court is now in session.”
My apologies to moot court watchers if I’m getting any of the details wrong. Recording devices were prohibited. One reason why, suggested Prof. Philip Genty, the competition’s faculty director, is to prevent a leak of Justice Alito’s comments. If the comments of a Supreme Court justice were to get out, even in a fictional case, they could be construed in a way that might indicate how the justice “would rule on a similar case in the future.”
Each counsel had 20 minutes to make his presentation. And while there were justifiable nerves, none of the difficult, sometimes off-the-cuff questions asked by the judges—Judge Cabranes later referred to them as “madmen questions” that “came out of nowhere”—seemed to trip up the lawyers-to-be.
Perhaps the most intense moments came in the back-and-forth between the judges and the defense over questions about how broadly the definition of lobbying could be interpreted.
When the arguments ended, the auditorium burst into applause and the judges retired to deliberate.
About 20 minutes later, they returned. Justice Alito praised the students’ performance before getting around to awarding the prize for best oral presentation to Alexander Ely and the prize for best final brief to Aaron Michael Macris. The judges weren’t asked to rule in favor of either the plaintiff or the defendant.
Justice Alito praised the students for exceeding “some really good attorneys that appear before our courts.”
By the way, the case was 110 fictional pages long and the judges seemed to have read it thoroughly.
Mr. Ely, who represented myDoc, the plaintiff appellant, attributed his winning performance to having argued both sides of the case earlier in the competition. But he added, “No amount of work can prepare you for some of the questions. It’s difficult to anticipate the hypotheticals.”
A high point? “Having an exchange with a sitting Supreme Court justice while you’re still a law student—I’ll always remember that.”
—ralph.gardner@wsj.com