Three Northwestern students were the first undergraduates to write a mock trial case used by the American Mock Trial Association.
Stephanie Zosak and Lindsay Eyler, Weinberg seniors, and Elliott Dionisio, a Communication junior, wrote the simulated kidnapping trial last year, the first-year AMTA accepted undergraduate submissions.
Their case has been used nationwide by 500 student teams.
The Mock Trial team worked on the case for a month and a half last spring, Zosak said. The defendant is charged with kidnapping his employer’s child because he needed the ransom for his wife’s operation.
Although AMTA never accepted an undergraduate team’s case before, Zosak said she was “pretty confident” that the organization would take theirs.
NU Mock Trial and the School of Law’s Jessup Moot Court team have also seen success in regional competitions.
Four Mock Trial teams participated in the American Mock Trial Association’s Milwaukee Regional Tournament Feb. 18 and 19. They took second through fifth place out of the 20 teams that participated.
The second-place team is headed to Iowa in April for the National Championship Tournament. The third-place team will compete in Minnesota this month to try to qualify for that tournament.
Zosak, who was on the second-place team, said her favorite part of Mock Trial is competing well.
“We go through a lot of practicing and hard work for trials and seeing all that pay off is the reward,” she said.
The School of Law’s Moot Court teams were also successful last month and will move on to higher levels.
An NU team won first place in its region for the second year in a row at the Philip C. Jessup International Law Moot Court Competition in February. In April, the team will compete at the international conference in Washington, D.C.
It will be one of 12 U.S. teams participating in the competition. About 100 countries will be represented.
“This is quite rare, given that only one team advances from the region. This is the first time that I know of where NU advanced two years in a row,” said Ben Berman, a second-year law student and captain of NU’s Moot Court team.
NU won first place in the legal brief award, and Gwen Carroll and John Watkins, both second-year law students, received awards in the speaking category.
Sunil Harjani, Law ’00 and an attorney for the Division of Enforcement at the U.S. Security and Exchange Commission, has coached the Moot Court team since 2001.
He has worked with the team since September to prepare for this year’s competition. The team has been researching international issues and practicing their arguments in front of former moot court members, Harjani said.
Berman attributed the victory to the team members’ hard work.
“We didn’t go into the competition expecting to win,” he said. “Every member of the team put an enormous amount of effort into this endeavor, so it was a great feeling when they announced that we won the regional.”
Reach Andrea Castillo at [email protected].
