Scaling the same heights as in the last few years was never likely this year owing to the ‘moving on’ of some extremely accomplished mooters.  Chief among these was undoubtedly Sarah Hair, who was not only exceptionally talented at written and oral argument in her own right, but also everyone’s ideal team mate.  Her partner in the 2023 OUP competition in which we were runners-up, Ruby Sturgeon, chose to concentrate her own efforts leading QUB Women in Law, so we began the year without any really experienced mooters among our team.

We had a very keenly contested oral argument exercise in October 2023 before Madam Justice McBride, Philip Aldworth KC and David Capper where two teams were chosen to represent the School in the two ‘premier league’ competitions – OUP and Essex Court.  The teams were Erika Lim and Tarra Ng and Luke Wilson and David Atkinson.  Unfortunately OUP decided not to run their mooting competition this year so Erika and Tarra were deprived of the opportunity their performance in the oral argument exercise merited.  Luke and David were eliminated by an extremely impressive Manchester Metropolitan team in the second round of Essex Court so our participation in these competitions ended earlier than we are used to.

The autumn’s novice moot produced a strong winning team in Benton Madsen and George Farnon who went on to reach the semi finals of the UCC Matheson Moot in February 2024 along with another QUB team (Erika Lim and Oliver Lancaster).

Fallon Burns and Rebecca Carlin flew the flag for us in the LSE Featherstone Moot at around the same time as the UCC moot. 

Slightly later Eden Wilson and Oliver Lancaster participated in the Kent Triathlon (won by Sarah Hair and Emilia Lye last year) finishing 11^th out of 19 overall.  However Eden won the best advocate prize in her room of 10 teams and is clearly a talent to watch in future.

The year finished with an open moot on 25^th April.  Edeline Lim and Constance Lee prevailed over Sean Brown and Shay Reid in the final judged by Sean Doran KC, Conor Higgins (Baker & McKenzie) and David Capper.  Constance was unanimously judged to be best advocate on the night.  Edeline and Constance have just graduated so we won’t be able to see them in action for us in the future but both can take great confidence from their performance into their advocacy careers.  Sean and Shay are freshers so they may have a significant role next year.