Marist’s Moot Court Club

Gabriela Carchi '26 and Sophia Karathanasis '28 on Constitution Day after demonstrating appellate arguments. Photo by Ava Battinelli '26

Marist University draws new students in for a large variety of reasons, one of the most prolific being the ever-expanding number of clubs offered. The vast array of clubs at Marist caters to a diverse number of interests across disciplines and activities. 

One club in particular that has been growing exponentially since its founding in 2022: the Moot Court Club, run by Dr. Julie Raines, associate professor of crime and justice studies.

The Moot Court Club is an appellate advocacy club that teaches students how to participate in oral and written arguments. These arguments center around affirming or challenging decisions made by theoretical lower courts. Members put these skills into practice through a series of events that take place during the fall semester.

The first of these events is a multi-institutional, wide invitational tournament held on the Marist campus. While not a competition sanctioned by the American Moot Court Association (AMCA), it serves as valuable practice for the later regional tournament. The invitational allows participants to “practice their public speaking, develop practical legal skills and apply critical thinking to relevant legal issues,” according to Club President Alison Bowler ‘26.

The AMCA regional tournament has students compete in pairs against over 30 teams. Each competitor then chooses one of two contemporary constitutional issues to argue, which is either determined by the league or by random. Then the pair must argue both for the respondent's position, affirming the lower court’s decision, and the petitioner’s position, challenging their arguments, doing so a total of three times: once on each side, and then a final round assigned randomly. The tournament also features a competition for written case briefs.

This year, Bowler and club officer John Boom ‘26 both ranked among the top ten orators at the Fall Eastern Regional and received awards in the Best Speaker category. The club itself also earned honorable mentions in the Brief Writing competition, which sees competitors from hundreds of schools.

When discussing the club's success, Dr. Raines said, “This year we had students advance to a second day of competition, which is really challenging,” said Raines. “Out of our four teams, we had one team that advanced to the next day of competition. So out of eight Marist students, we had four who did exceptionally well in regional competition this past season.”

There are also pre-national competitions, in which a select group of winning pairs advance from regionals to pre-nationals, and an even smaller group of winners from pre-nationals make it into the real national competition. As the Marist Moot Court Club has been getting its footing as an established club on campus, the club has set its sights on bringing Red Foxes to the national competition.

“The vulnerability of public speaking and the provocation of balancing personal insight with dense case law are two strenuous, but extraordinarily worthwhile experiences that have shaped me into the student I am today,” said Bowler. “Overall, you learn a lot about how you perceive issues and what biases you may unconsciously hold.”

“The club's main goals for this year are to recruit more students for competition so that we can send six or seven teams to regional competition in the fall and to host our second annual invitational tournament this fall, where we bring in moot court teams from other schools to practice for regional moot court tournaments,” said Raines.