About the Moot
The European Law Moot Court Competition, is a competition in the area of European Union institutional law. It has a twenty years long tradition and it gathers participants from the universities all oround the world.
The Competition consists of three phases:
A written phase, in which all teams shall prepare written pleadings for both, the applicant and the defendant, based upon a hypothetical European law problem,
An oral (Regional Final) phase, in which the teams, who are selected on the basis of their written pleadings and a geographical criterion, shall defend their argumentation before a regional final Court, pleading for both, the applicant and the defendant, and as either an Advocate General or as a Commission Representative, and
Subject to the consent of the Court of Justice, the Competition will each year be concluded with the All European Final in Luxembourg, at which the winning teams and the winning Advocate Generals and Commission Representatives of the regional rounds will meet and compete.
It should be noted that today teams which compete come not only from Member States of the European Union but also from the Central and East-european countries, the USA, Canada, and even Australia. Regional finals have been held in various cities such as Thessaloniki, Exeter, Vienna, Bruges, Maastricht, Stockholm, Toulouse, Lisbon, Parma, Copenhagen, Budapest, Warsaw, Durham, Tallinn, Tartu, Prague, Edimburgh, Toulouse, Uppsala, Florence, S. Francisco (USA), Basel, Cologne, Maastricht, Zagreb, Pécs, Istanbul, Kiev,Helsinki, Paris, Madrid, Bratislava, Vilnius, Riga, etc.
The ELMC Society, a voluntary association in which several nationalities are represented, continues to refine the rules and supervise the material organization of each year’s competition including the co-ordination of written pleadings, Regionals and the Final. The co-ordination of each competition has passed from the hands of Munich through organizers in Utrecht, Dublin, Exeter, Nijmegen, Maastricht, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Lisbon and now Madrid. Looking to the future the ELMC Society is now firmly established on well structured lines and enjoys the active support of the Union Institutions and major law firms in several countries, such as De Brauw Blackstone Westbroek, Van Bael & Bellis and Mannheimer Swartling. The members of the winning team of the All-European Final shall be offered trainee-ships at European institutions or in European law firms.
More information and the documents relevant for previous competitions can be found on the official site of the competition: zealot.mrnet.pt/mootcourt
