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Wednesday, May 06, 2009
Courts - "National Mock Trial Competition Encounters a Real Legal Challenge "
The ILB on March 31st posted this entry on the National High School Mock Trial Competition, headed "Kentucky students' court operates just like real thing." Today the NY Times reports that the competition has run into trouble. From the story by Robbie Brown:
ATLANTA — The nation’s top high school mock trial competition has become an actual legal battleground.Earlier this spring, the Maimonides School, an Orthodox Jewish day school in Brookline, Mass., won the state mock trial championship — and with it a coveted spot in the prestigious national competition in Atlanta this weekend. But the finals of the tournament fall on Saturday, and the students do not compete on the Sabbath.
When tournament organizers refused to tweak the schedule, the students’ parents and school officials did what supporters of any attorney-in-training might do: they hired a lawyer, Nathan Lewin, a renowned litigator who has tried cases before the United States Supreme Court. Mr. Lewin filed a complaint of religious discrimination with the Department of Justice, which promised to investigate.
The Anti-Defamation League also sent a letter of complaint to the National High School Mock Trial Championship, and parents expressed their concerns to Georgia’s attorney general and the state bar association, the host of the competition.
“We care about our children getting to participate,” said Jeffrey J. Kosowsky, a consultant whose son, Michael, is a team captain. “We don’t care about suing, but we want to make sure that they take this seriously.”
The students, whose school had never won a state championship in any activity, were crestfallen when told of the national scheduling problem. But they were also excited about their new role.
“The idea of a mock trial being in the middle of a real legal battle is pretty cool,” said Leah Sarna, 17, another captain.
Her father, Jonathan D. Sarna, a well-known professor of Jewish history at Brandeis University, said the team was learning a legal lesson about “what it means to be a minority group.”
The team will compete in the tournament on Friday but will not be able to win the championship.
In 2005, another Jewish school competed in the tournament, which was held in North Carolina that year. The schedule was changed for the team, but tournament organizers later adopted a rule against making special exceptions.
Posted by Marcia Oddi on May 6, 2009 09:53 AM
Posted to Courts in general