The night before their moot court competition, the students of Francis Lewis High School were nervous. For nearly two months, twenty students practiced twice weekly, two hours at a time, in front of a rotating group of eight Proskauer attorney coaches. The students read numerous Supreme Court cases and incorporated those cases into an oral argument on behalf of fictional clients. The pretend fact pattern the students were given concerned the constitutionality of a stop-and-frisk of a young woman in a high crime area.  The students’ progress over the two months was palpable. At the beginning, the students spoke for a fraction of the time that they were allotted, their arguments lacked persuasiveness and organization as they spoke reluctantly, with awkward pauses and giggles you might expect from nervous teenagers.  But session after session, those issues vanished.

The students mastered the make-believe fact pattern which at first seemed so complicated.  The formalities of arguing before a panel of judges – which at first seemed daunting – were now innate. And the attorney coaches had become their close mentors and friends.  But the night of the competition, eating cookies around a Proskauer conference room with their coaches, the nerves were back in full force. “What if we can’t remember a case? What if we go blank? What if we embarrass ourselves? What if we lose?”