In September, I had the privilege of speaking on a panel at The New York City Bar Association titled “Securing Democracy For Tomorrow.” Moderated by United States Magistrate Judge Katharine Parker, the event focused on the importance of civic education. To start things off, Dawn Smalls, a partner at Jenner & Block, introduced the keynote speaker, Schools Chancellor David Banks. David is a strong supporter of civic education and its capacity to empower students as change agents that have a genuine, lasting effect in their communities. He shared powerful firsthand examples from his career, in which he witnessed the impact of student activism as a positive force for social change in some of our most underserved neighborhoods.
Francis Lewis High School Makes Semi-Final Run in Moot Court Competition
For over 30 years, Proskauer lawyers have worked with students from Francis Lewis High School in Queens to help prepare them for moot court competitions. This year’s program was unlike any other with practices held over Zoom from living rooms and bedrooms across the City; and, instead of walking up to the lectern at the Thurgood Marshall Courthouse, a grand classical revival landmark in lower Manhattan, each student argued at home in front of a laptop. Despite the challenging situation, the competitors made it to the semi-finals of this year’s Metropolitan Mentor Moot Court competition for the first time in ten years.
Confidence Through Competition: High Schoolers Excel in Moot Court
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?”