The UTC Mock Trial came home from the National Championship with a serious bragging point.
In a head-to-head battle, the team beat Yale University, which won the National Championship last year.
Having also competed in 2017, UTC was one of only 24 teams in the country who made it to the tournament, held in Minneapolis, in back-to-back years. In addition, the team doubled the number of wins from last year’s championship despite competing against mock-trial powerhouses such as Ohio State University, the University of California-Irvine, Xavier University and Tufts University.
In mock trials, teams are given the particulars of a case—the lawsuit or criminal charges, case law, depositions, witness list, exhibits—a few weeks prior to the competition. Once the trial starts, both teams must finish the entire procedure within three hours. And winning or losing is irrelevant; there’s no verdict. What counts is the judges’ scores.
In competition, teams aren’t just on one side or the other—prosecutor or defense. To prepare, they must work both sides of the aisle, developing legal arguments for the plaintiff and the defendant and acting as lawyers for both sides. Team members also play the roles of witnesses and must prepare for those, too.
Team member Zeke Starr, a senior in political science and history, has been invited to compete individually in a tournament of champions in Boston. In the semifinals leading up to this year’s national championship, he won an individual Best Attorney award, the only attorney to do so on both the prosecution and defendant sides of the case.
