Last Thursday saw BoB, his mooting partner, the Mistress of the Moots, and a friend who wanted to come along and support us, climb into a rather nice hire car (paid for by the law school) and set off to the hallowed learning establishment that is Oxford University.
Now I am a fairly confident guy and feel that I am a fairly accomplished mooter but I must admit that the thought of going to Oxford to face the two best undergraduate mooters at the university did make me feel a little anxious. Especially seeing as the preparation had been less than I would have liked due to other more pressing problems such as keeping on top of my work for the third year (where has the time gone?).
We arrived at Magdalen College after a very pleasant drive through the snowy Oxfordshire countryside and after parking the car fled to the nearest coffee house to finish preparing our bundles (I told you that the prep was a little lacking). Come five o'clock we changed into our best attire and made our way to the mock court (lovely oak panelled room in the college). The other team were already there and after a brief exchange of pleasantries and bundles we sat and waited for the Judge to arrive.
Now as you may recall from my last post (apologies for the lack of posting) I have recently revised my mooting style and now only use the briefest of notes and the selected quotations I require. In fact on my last ground of appeal I had written next to no notes at all and was, for want of a better word, winging it. As it turned out if I had written very detailed notes it would have been an absolute disaster. The Judge was very tough and the entire experience was more like a cross between the Spanish inquisition and a one on one seminar with the strictest tutor imaginable. This is not to say that it wasn't enjoyable because it was actually great fun with even a sharing of jokes over the facts of one of the cases involved (a man caught on CCTV receiving fellatio from his girlfriend).
As we were the respondents in this case we had to listen to the Oxford team go first who both sounded very professional, calm, and collected. I must admit that when it came to the Judge giving the verdict I was not sure which way it would go. He gave a very long judgment on the law (which we lost on both points) and then finally gave the result 49%...to the appellants and 51% to the respondents. We had beaten the best that Oxford had to offer. We were obviously thrilled and to top the evening off the Oxford team took us out for an all expenses paid dinner afterwards. We are now looking forward to the third round, although the question is on trusts which is a subject I hoped to never have to deal with again.
All the best and hope everyone is well
BoB
