Cooley Law School’s Moot Court team won the Best Brief award at Florida State University’s Claude Pepper Elder Law Moot Court competition in November at FSU Law in Tallahassee, Florida.
The team consisted of law students from Cooley’s Tampa Bay campus: Gabriella Logiudice, Safa Kudia and Colby Weron.
For Cooley, Logiudice was the brief writer on the team, while Kudia and Weron conducted research and spent countless hours debating the structure of each argument. They progressed to the elimination rounds, and faced GW Law in their elimination round and did not progress.
During the competition, 20 briefs from 20 moot court teams were evaluated, including teams from The George Washington University Law School, Baylor University School of Law, The University of Chicago Law School, Chicago-Kent College of Law at Illinois Institute of Technology, Stetson University College of Law, University of California San Francisco, and Texas Tech University School of Law.
Law students from Cooley’s Lansing, Michigan, campus also competed in the competition, including: Arjan Malushi (brief writer), Larry Westcomb and Jasmin Guillen.
The competition does not allow any help from outside sources with anything except the basics of brief writing. Teams could not talk with practitioners or professors about the legal issues raised by the fact pattern.
Christine Zellar Church, professor at Cooley Law School, who coached the Tampa Bay team, said the competition draws some of the best moot court teams from around the country.
“All of our students learn so much from picking a fact pattern apart, researching the fine points of the law, writing a brief, and then engaging in oral argument with teams from other schools,” she said. “We are all so proud of the hard work and excellence of our students.”
