THE AUTHORS:
M. Belén Paoletta, Partner at IntLaw LLP
Ivan Levy, Partner at IntLaw LLP
Introduction
For those of us who work in international legal matters, there is something deeply familiar about the world of international moot court competitions. We all know established professionals who once participated in one, or students who are currently preparing to do so.
For some of them, a moot court competition was the reason they obtained a passport for the first time. For others, it was the reason they had to buy their first suit and tie or upgrade their digital devices to be able to research and study properly.
We have all heard, and many of us have lived, inspiring stories of resilience and commitment. Long journeys, late-night study sessions, moments of anxiety and exhaustion, and the kind of uncontrollable laughter that leaves your stomach and cheeks aching. Some of us met our partners through mooting and formed families. Some of us developed friendships that have lasted for years, far beyond four or five days of competition. And, for some of us, participating in a moot court competition was what defined our experience as law students. It was the experience that “rewired our brains” forever.
With the launch of the IntLaw Investment Arbitration Moot (“IntLaw Moot”), we hope to provide that stepping stone for students from around the world. In this article, we explain the values guiding our decisions, the space we hope to occupy within the investment arbitration moot court landscape, and the measures we are taking to fulfill our mission.
The oral rounds of the Inaugural Edition of the IntLaw Moot will take place at the International Arbitration Centre in London, from February 18 to 22, 2027.
The Value Behind the IntLaw Moot
The IntLaw Moot is part of the IntLaw Foundation and reflects the convictions that have shaped our own work in international law. One is that the peaceful settlement of international disputes must remain the compass for how we think about, teach, and practice international legal matters. This is why the IntLaw Moot bears a compass as its logo.
Once we had decided to pursue this endeavor, we asked ourselves what students should take away from the competition, what the IntLaw Moot could give them that a classroom could not, and what we wanted the competition itself to look and feel like.
With the IntLaw Moot, we have aimed to create the kind of competition we would have wanted to join as students. One in which the case was difficult enough to consume our conversations for months, and there was always another factual detail to notice or argument to reconsider. But also one in which, after an afternoon being dismantled by a tribunal, we could end the day laughing with the people whose arguments we had spent hours trying to counter.
We do not believe that legal precision and enjoyment are competing values. A moot can ask a great deal of students and still make room for the moments that make people fall in love with mooting in the first place. We have therefore sought to carry both ideas through the design of the IntLaw Moot. An Editorial Board and a Tribunals Board work with us on the technical details of the case and on securing arbitrators and ensuring fairness in scoring, respectively. A Moot Affairs Board works on building community and making the moot a memorable experience even before the oral rounds start. They are also planning virtual sessions to break the ice before everyone meets in London.
As the IntLaw Moot took shape, another important question emerged: what should remain once the competition is over?
A great deal of energy goes into preparing for an international moot court competition. Students spend months researching, writing, rehearsing, and reorganizing their lives around a fictional dispute. Arbitrators give up evenings and weekends to read and provide feedback. We wanted that investment of time to produce something beyond a paper certificate.
Sometimes what follows from a moot is substantial: an internship, a scholarship, a course, or a new professional relationship. Sometimes it is much smaller and impossible to plan: a conversation that changes the direction of a thesis, an introduction to somebody working in an area we had never considered, or simply the confidence to apply for something we would otherwise have dismissed as out of reach. We cannot engineer those outcomes, but we can build a competition in which more of those opportunities can arise. One of our ambitions is to ensure that participation contributes to the educational and professional development of those involved beyond the competition itself.
There is also an institutional dimension to this ambition. Some universities arrive at international moots with decades of experience, established coaching structures, and alumni who return each year. Others begin with a handful of students trying to work out what a memorial should look like. That difference matters where access to specialized training in investment arbitration remains limited, even though those countries and their investors participate in investor-State arbitration.
Our answer is not to ask less of those teams but to consider what they need to compete on equal intellectual terms. Our ultimate goal is to build capacity in those universities so that, over time, graduates exposed to investor-State arbitration can work in the private or public sector and strengthen their countries’ capacity in the field.
Connecting Investment Arbitration Mooting Communities
Investment arbitration is, by definition, international. Yet, many of the exchanges that take place around its study and practice are not necessarily global in composition.
There are already established investment arbitration competitions, each of which has done considerable work in building communities around the field within Europe, Asia, Egypt, and Latin America. The IntLaw Moot seeks to connect those communities and create a space in which their students and professionals can engage and learn from one another.
We believe there is intellectual value in putting students who have been trained in different legal traditions before the same problem and asking them to persuade the same tribunal. The arguments change, and sometimes what one team considers obvious might not be to another team from a different jurisdiction. That is the kind of exchange we want to encourage.
Connecting established communities is only part of the objective; we also want to broaden participation. Some jurisdictions remain largely absent from investment arbitration mooting despite their role in international investment practice. We have therefore reached beyond the countries from which teams traditionally emerge, particularly in Africa (including sub-Saharan Africa), Central America, the Caribbean, and Oceania. A global composition does not arise simply because registration is available worldwide.
Sara Tadić, our Chief Ambassador, has helped us in this regard. We have sent over 2,500 emails and LinkedIn messages to students, coaches, and professors from all over the world. Many readers may already have had contact already with us and, we hope their universities will join the inaugural edition.
Sometimes, our outreach efforts have meant identifying a university with no prior experience in investment arbitration mooting, or even in international moot court competitions more broadly, and finding a professor willing to help establish its first team. Sometimes the obstacles revolve around a lack of coaches, access to research materials, funding, or simply the fact that nobody at the institution had heard of the competition before.
Our aim is to create opportunities for dialogue that would otherwise be unlikely to occur between students trained in different legal traditions, universities with very different mooting experiences, and professionals whose approaches to investment law and dispute settlement have been shaped by different institutional contexts.
We hope that, over time, the IntLaw Moot can become one of the places where those communities meet.
Putting the Mission into Practice
Values mean little if they appear only in an about section. Our decisions have therefore sought to translate those ideas into things participants can use.
Accessibility is one example. Registration fees are differentiated according to the World Bank income classification applicable to the participating university’s country.
Regarding educational and research platforms, teams receive complimentary access to GAR Academy courses, and to Jus Mundi and Investor-State LawGuide for their research.
To build capacity, especially within institutions with less established mooting cultures, we operate a Coaching Matching Program for universities without an experienced coach. We also organize complimentary online seminars and workshops throughout the preparation period.
None of those measures eliminate the very real cost and effort involved in participating in an international moot court competition. We are aware that a research-platform subscription does not buy a plane ticket, and a coach does not solve every institutional difficulty, but there are barriers that are within our power to reduce.
The same thinking has shaped our institutional relationships. Our supporters contribute more than just their names: they assist with outreach, provide prizes, resources during the competition, and organize events linked to the competition.
Shortening the distance between studying law and developing a career in international arbitration also guides our approach to prizes. Of course, winning an award matters, but we intend those recognitions to do more than recognize that effort. Wherever possible, we want recognition in the IntLaw Moot to open another door.
That philosophy applies equally to arbitrators. Arbitrators donate a remarkable amount of time to students’ education. We want the IntLaw Moot to acknowledge that contribution not only symbolically but, where possible, by creating opportunities for their continued professional development as well.
At the time of writing, confirmed student prizes include internships, full tuition waivers for academic and professional programs, and access to research platforms. Arbitrators’ prizes include a full complimentary pass to the Finland Arbitration Institute’s Arbitration Masterclass, complimentary places in the SCCA (Saudi Center for Commercial Arbitration) Academy’s Arbitral Tribunal Secretary Preparation Program, and books provided by the SCC Arbitration Institute.
Further prizes and professional opportunities are being developed with supporting institutions and will be announced as the inaugural edition approaches.
The Case: All About That Bet v. Kingdom of Trafalgar
In designing the IntLaw Moot Case, we have sought to be technically rigorous, while very dynamic and entertaining. The case, which introduces part of what will be the IntLaw Moot universe, is called All About That Bet v. Kingdom of Trafalgar, and concerns a fictional investment dispute arising from regulatory measures affecting a sports-betting investor.
The case is conducted under the SCC Arbitration Rules 2023 and raises questions across several dimensions of contemporary investment arbitration. Teams must consider:
- indirect expropriation and whether multiple State measures can constitute a composite act, the scope of a State’s regulatory powers;
- use of a most-favored-nation clause to invoke fair and equitable treatment under a terminated treaty; and
- participation of the investor’s home State as a non-disputing treaty party.
The last issue brings students into the procedural framework of the SCC Rules and the UNCITRAL Rules on Transparency 2013 regime. As the SCC has highlighted, the problem gives students an opportunity to engage with Article 4 of Appendix III to the SCC Arbitration Rules concerning participation by non-disputing treaty parties.
Some Additional Unique Features of the IntLaw Moot
To make the competition as procedurally realistic as possible, we have introduced a Procedural Development Stage. Ten days before the oral rounds, teams receive Procedural Order No. 3, which introduces a procedural hurdle into the case. For the inaugural edition, it will be released on February 8, 2027, shortly before teams arrive in London.
Arbitration rarely proceeds exactly as counsel imagined when filing the first submission. New evidence may appear, a witness may become unavailable, a third party may seek to participate, or a factual assumption may change. These developments may require counsel to reconsider arguments that appeared settled months earlier. Good advocacy therefore involves more than just preparing an excellent script. It requires adaptability, and the ability to identify what has changed, understand what that change means for the client’s case, and adjust without losing command of the broader strategy.
The Procedural Development is intended to introduce that dynamic. After months of studying the problem and constructing arguments, students must reassess their positions shortly before the hearings. The exercise tests a different skill from conventional moot preparation: adaptation and responsiveness under pressure.
Furthermore, after the oral rounds, applications will open for an Award Drafting Exercise. Three students will be selected on merit to prepare a reasoned excerpt of the arbitral award. This initiative extends the experience beyond advocacy by inviting selected participants to approach the case from the tribunal’s perspective and engage directly with arbitral decision-making.
Building a Community Beyond the Hearings
A case file can teach many things, but it cannot reproduce the moment when somebody we competed against becomes a friend. International arbitration is an extraordinarily international profession, but it is also a small one. People meet again. A student sitting opposite at a moot court competition may reappear years later as opposing counsel, as co-counsel, as a colleague, as a client, an arbitrator, or the person who shares an opportunity at exactly the right moment.
Professional relationships in this field often begin long before anybody calls them professional relationships. We therefore have not envisioned the IntLaw Moot as four days of hearings that will end when the winner is announced. Our objective is to build a community that develops across editions. Therefore, the Moot Affairs Board, led by Valentina Camuglia, is preparing a program in London that will include various activities.
